Using Vine & Instagram Video in the Classroom

With Twitter’s app, Vine, your students can create videos in six seconds. Put that together with Facebook’s Instagram video-capturing feature and challenge your students, or yourself, to create. Take a look at Edutopia’s “Five Minute Film Festival: Vine and Instagram Video in the Classroom.” It features examples of teachers having fun by producing short videos using these digital resources, and it compares uses of Vine and Instagram video.

Piaget and B.F. Skinner Tweets

Malbert Smith III, in an Education Week Commentary, wonders what would have happened if great thinkers in education had digital communication available to them. Would they have been able to spread their research and ideas or would modern ways of communication have limited their time to think deeply and engage in continuing observations? Although, Smith says that “our digital toolkits allow us to analyze and publish data faster, connect immediately to scholars about the globe, and disseminate findings instantly”, he suggests, when considering the time we and our students spend engaging in digital communication, that we have become “prisoners” of our devices. If Jean Piaget had tweeted about his children, Smith says, they “would have rebelled with tweets, blogs, and the ultimate rejection: Facebook unfriending.”

Pay Attention to Teacher Learning Styles

We ask teachers to adjust their teaching to the needs of students, but often we don’t follow the same advice when helping teachers. Paul Sanfrancesco, School CIO Advisor, asks, “Which PD Models Work?” He writes about educators going to PD sessions where speakers drone on and on. You’ve surely encountered some of these as well as techies leading training sessions who go so fast that hardly anyone understands anything. —Or, how about those sessions where they throw everyone together—tech experts, tech users, and not-so-tech-oriented teachers—to learn? Some already know what is being taught and find it a waste of time, some benefit from it, some aren’t ready for it, and some will be sure it will never fit into the content they teach and/or their teaching style.

Sanfrancesco asks you to contribute to the blog by adding your comments about professional development. We know that a one-size-fits-all model doesn’t work well for tech professional development. But what does?

Twitter Educational Hashtag Help

For guidance in educational Twitter resources, check Jeff Dunn’s A-Z Dictionary of Educational Twitter Hashtags. You’ll find the following lists: Most Popular Hashtags (global, teaching, kindergarten, etc.; Technology (apps, mobile learning, game-based, etc.); Subject Specific (math music, arts, history, etc.); Specific Areas/Roles (bullying, chat, homeschool, play, etc.); and full list (nearly all educational hashtags). According to Dunn, the educational hashtags on the list were curated by Cybraryman and the Creative Education blog, tweetsmarter.com, and hashtags.org.

Texting Parents

Lisa Neilsen, in SmartBlog on Education, gives us four ideas for connecting with parents through texting. These include use of services such as Remind101, Mobile Commons, ClassPager, Twitter, and Poll Everywhere. Remind101 and Mobile Commons are for mass messaging and are perfect for alerting parents about school closures and scheduled events. Messaging through ClassPager can be used for messaging to students and parents for homework, links to resources, and notices. Even if parents have not joined Twitter, they can receive tweets by following their children’s school and/or teacher messages. Poll everywhere is one of the “voting systems” you can use to survey parents’ opinions/ideas about school events, curricular offerings, summer reading, and/or other input you may want from parents. Neilsen’s blog entry gives links to the services and to selected schools that have put the services to work.

Tweeting in Kindergarten

They Tweet three times a week in Jennifer Aaron’s class. Aaron signs on to her private account, closes all other digital windows, and projects Twitter on her Smartboard.  She asks her class to “come up with 140 characters about the day.” Stickers are added and the Tweets sent to parents. According to Aaron, “Twitter is like the ideal thing for 5-year-olds because it is so short. It makes them think about their day and . . . summarize what they’ve done during the day . . . .”

Is anyone else out there using Twitter with students? Let us know how you are using it and what the positives and negatives are.

Multitasking Lowers IQ

According to researchers at Kings College of London “constant exposure to e-mail and other multitasking-friendly technology temporarily lowers IQ by 10 points–or about as much as skipping a night’s sleep and more than twice as much as smoking marijuana.” Hallowell’s book, CrazyBusy, suggests that multitasking with texting, emailing, tweeting, networking, and such is like “playing tennis with two balls.” Researchers at the University of California studied a group of professional people. It seemed that they could only remain on a task for about eleven minutes before they were “called” by some sort of digital messaging. After that, it took them twenty-five minutes to get back on task. Market research indicates that company workers waste 2.1 hours of work a day because of multitasking.  Dr. Hallowell says that with so much to do, so much information, so much “blabber” and multitasking all of us look like we have ADD. Consider how all this relates to our students, who are multitasking even more than most of us. The answer is not to unplug our students and ourselves, since multitasking is part of our world today, but instead to learn to use our tech tools wisely.

For Your Science & Tech Kids: Bot Arguing

Technology Review published by MIT tells the story of software developer Nigel Leck, who was spending time arguing on Twitter with those who don’t believe in the science of global warming. Instead of continuing to tell people the same things over and over, he created the Twitter chatbot@AI-AGW, which gives a variety of automatic responses to what Leck referred to as the “usual tired arguments”.  For the Twitter answers he created a database of hundreds of responses that link to scientific sources; the chatbot uses them when it goes out and searches Twitter for “set phrases”.  Most people getting answers don’t realize that they are not tweeting with a real person, for the chatbot has the ability to respond through a series of Tweets. Leck does admit that the bot isn’t great at understanding sarcasm. It’s an interesting way to get science ideas out and one wonders if this might be a good idea for a student project, not just on global warming but for many other topics and subjects as well.