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More Twitter Reasons in the Classroom

I came across some other great examples of twittering in the classroom.  I am excited to try this in my 5th grade class.  Although many students may or may not have access to a cell phone with text min. or  a computer at home.  I was going to assign a "twitter student" a day.  This student has free access to one of the computers in the classroom and will routinely tweet what we are doing and learning throughout the day.  Maybe we can find other classes throughout the world that are doing the same thing and we can follow them and vice versa?  Steve Wheeler's blog shares some good twittering ideas:

1. ‘Twit Board’ Notify students of changes to course content, schedules, venues or other important information. 
2. ‘Summing Up’ Ask students to read an article or chapter and then post their brief summary or précis of the key point(s). A limit of 140 characters demands a lot of academic discipline.

3. ‘Twit Links’ Share a hyperlink – a directed task for students – each is required to regularly share one new hyperlink to a useful site they have found.

4. ‘Twitter Stalking’ Follow a famous person and document their progress. Better still if this can be linked to an event (During the recent U.S. Presidential elections, many people followed @BarackObama and kept up to date with his speeches, etc).
5. ‘Time Tweet’ Choose a famous person from the past and create a twitter account for them – choose an image which represents the historical figure and over a period of time write regular tweets in the role of that character, in a style and using the vocabulary you think they would have used (e.g. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar).

6. ‘Micro Meet’ Hold discussions involving all the subscribing students. As long as everyone is following the whole group, no-one should miss out on the Twitter stream. All students participate because a sequence of contributors is agreed beforehand.

7. ‘Micro Write’ Progressive collaborative writing on Twitter. Students agree to take it in turns to contribute to an account or ‘story’ over a period of time.

8. ‘Lingua Tweeta’ Good for modern language learning. Send tweets in foreign languages and ask students to respond in the same language or to translate the tweet into their native language.

9. ‘Tweming’ Start off a meme – agree on a common hash-tag so that all the created content is automatically captured by Twemes or another aggregator.

10. ‘Twitter Pals’ Encourage students to find a Twitter ‘penpal’ and regularly converse with them over a period of time to find out about their culture, hobbies, friends, family etc. Ideal for learning about people from other cultures. 

Here is a great video about Teaching with Twitter:

Second Life and Education Vlog

Educational Uses of Second Life

There are so many different focuses of educational uses of Second Life but first I Let's talk about how teachers are using Second Life in RL (real life).  I will share some great worlds and share some ideas on how they are being used or how you and I can use these tools in the classroom.

Centre for Water Studies @ Better World Island (click on links to Teleport to world)

This world includes six distinct habitats that simulate real water life.  Each habitat includes notecards, animals, plants and environment.  Group students into cooperative groups and assign a water habitat such as:  Mangrove Swamp, Pacific Northwest Rainforest, Pondlife, Waterfall with pool and stream, Coral Barrier Reef or Ocean beach with undersea marine life.  Students will explore their area read information about each distinct habitat.  Student then will research and determine dangers to this habitat and report on it to class.

Learn about sustainability in Etopia Island 

After students research their water habitat the cooperative groups can research sustainabilities of the environment in Etopia Island.  This world showcases renewable energy, organic living in an authentic environment.  

• Have students take the sustainability quiz and elicit background knowledge of subject
• Take a bike ride around the world to see what looks interesting or take the train around to get a quick glimpse of the world.
• Learn about Wind, solar and water energy
• Have students learn about cohousing communities and is this something they see themselves using in the future?

Think it is difficult to teach empathy?  Try simulating a

 debilitating mental disorder such as schizophrenia 

"This clinic building is based on the hallucinations of two specific people with schizophrenia. They were interviewed in detail and gave feedback on early designs for the hallucinations. While the hallucinations are not glamorous, they fairly accurately reproduce these patients' experiences.  You should get a sense of just how intrusive the voices of schizophrenia really are."  At the end of the experience students take

 a survey to reflect on the experiment.

History comes alive in Second Life!  

Visit Land of Lincoln and your avatar can put on authentic clothing and listen to the Gettysburg Address.  Take a carriage ride and visit Linco

ln's birth home or a Antebellum Southern Plantation. Don't just read about a time and place, experience it!    

In Lincoln Land students can visit the lending library and read literature from the time period. Open the books just as you would the real books.

Second Life and Education

As I have been playing with Second Life over the past month I have thought of many different ways to bring this into my classroom.  First my thinking was using the rich culture worlds and students can role play in Egypt, Nazi Germany, Mexico and I even went swimming with sharks.  So much can be done with this but, there are so many barriers that make it difficult to break through.  

Ross Perkins, Ph.D is an instructional designer and has designed many of the educational sites for Second Life.  He states that although this is a terrific tool, many teachers still are using the same old teaching techniques but, in SL.  If it can be

 done in Real Life (RL) then why do it in SL?  For instance; meeting in a community room in SL as avatars and using a white board as an instructor lectures.  Yes, innovative in the fact that it is in SL but not unique.  Where SL has it's benefits is g

oing to places that students can't go. Some great sites that educators can visit and provide a virtual trip to hist

orical and educational sites.

Teleport to Ancient Rome: http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Roman%20Empire/103/3/22

Teleport to Astrono

my Planetarium: 

 http://slurl.com/secondlife/Honawan/96/122/421

Experience a Tsunami @ http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meteora/202/32/2

Live and experience Native American lands @ http://slurl.com/secondlife/Native%20Lands%20East/212/34/23

Podcasting in the Classroom

WHAT IS PODCASTING?

 It is a relatively new form of communication.  Merging or "Mashing" Blogging and radio together.  The difference is that anyone can do it!  You don't 

have to have a radio studio, radio show or even a radio to share or listen to a podcast. Podcasting can be listened to with any computer or MP3 device such as an ipod.  

Listeners are notified through their RSS feed that new content is available. After you have downloaded the podcast to your device you can then listen or even watch it at anytime.  

Anyone with a simple computer and a microphone can be a podcaster.  

Podcasting can contain other media elements such as audio, video, images, PDF or other.

Students, teachers, administrators, classrooms, administrators and more are podcasting on a regular basis.  

So what can a teacher do with podcasts? 

Grammar Girl: Daily Grammar tips such as:  Starting a sentence with "however", the difference between who and whom, collective nouns and so much more!  This would be great with a high school Language Arts class.  This can be a podcast that can be used in a station or center for remedial help.

Writing Fix: A website dedicated to inspiring students to be better writers.  One of the key pieces of this site is teaching with ipods.  Rob Stone shares his lessons using podcasting and ipods.

Willowdale:  A great site to see how elementary students and teachers are using podcasting.

Storynory: A great site filled with podcasts rich with storytellers!  New fiction, fairy tales, myths, historical fiction and more!  Students listen to rich storytellers using their talent to create a dynamic oral story. This pod and many more can be found on itunes as a free subscription.  

                                                     

Sample uses of podcasts in the Classroom:

Weekly News Broadcasts:  Local or school current events, lunch menu and assignments.  Have students produce these broadcasts for parent communication.

Document a Field Trip:   Students can report and document on a field trip recently taken

Book Talk: Students read literature and instead of writing a summary about students give a podcast on the book.

Record lecture or class discussion: Record discussion so students absent may listen at home.

Fluency Lesson: Students practice reading aloud a book a few levels below.  After significant practice students read aloud the picture book into recording and submit it to itunes.  Share the digital book to lover level grades or even the local children's hospital.

Free software and news feed for podcasting:

Garageband (MAC)

Radio Willow Web

Podcast Pickle

Podcast Alley

itunes

RSS FEEDS -THE NEW PAPERBOY

Remember when the paperboy would throw the newspaper on your driveway once in the morning and again in the afternoon? That was how we got the latest news of the day. Now we are inundated with news, news on the cell phone, news on the computer at work, news on the computer at home, news on all more than 20 Cable channels. News, News everywhere. So now we are blasted with news everywhere and it is difficult to filter what is important to us.

RSS feeds is the new sophisticated paper boy. Not only does he deliver the information to you directly but, he delivers the news the news you want and filters out the rest.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and the news aggregator is the program you download to read the RSS feeds. Meg Ormiston describes it as "the News Aggregator is the television set and the RSS feeds are the channels you can select".

The news aggregators are sites you can download for free such as www.feedreader.com.  Once you have that whenever you are on a news site, blog or journal site you can then click on the RSS feed and it will send all new updated information straight to you.  See it is our own personal sophisticated paperboy.

RSS FOR TEACHERS:

As a teacher you are on all different sites researching lesson plans, methodologies as well as fun ideas.  So many different sites to choose from and my bookmarks are getting to long to even remember what and why I liked them. Using RSS feeds allows you to quickly look at the feeds for the day to see if anything new and interesting has changed.  If you like what you see you can quickly click on the link and it will then go to the site for full review. 

• Teacher can assign students a RSS feed to subscribe to, they are responsible for summarizing newsworthy information and can then update class.  (great for current events)
• Have students subscribe to your class blog and when new and important information comes in they are sure to see it quickly.
• As a teacher if you have assigned students to create a wikki, blog or other site then as a teacher you can subscribe to their RSS feed and when they update you get the information.
• Instead of journaling students can create a blog for all journal entries.  When the journals have been updated the feed goes directly to the teacher for grade.
• Educators can follow other educators and capitalize on each others work in a collborative fashion rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
• Professional Development on demand:  Educators can keep up with their favorite author, blogger and podcaster.  Follow them and watch/listen/read when you have a free minute or two.