Monday, February 9, 2015

Tech Teach-In

Hello again everyone! It has been a while since I have posted, before winter in fact. Regardless, I am back now. For this blog post I want to release my thoughts to you all about my Tech Teach-In lesson. First a little bit of context. I am currently teaching in a 9th grade World History and Geography class and I have recently been thinking more and more about how Twitter could possibly be used in an educational setting. Twitter seems to be calling to me in someway to be used in the classroom, perhaps it is because of my newly found occasional hobby of tweeting about professional wrestling? Nevertheless, my interest in the website has grown.

But how can I use it in the classroom? My first thoughts on this conundrum began when my history class was learning about the Crusades. There are many different historical "characters" that were prevalent in this time: Christian Crusaders, the Pope, Muslims, various kings, and even child Crusaders. This got me thinking about how important perspective tacking is in the discipline of history. Commonly called historical empathy, historical perspective taking can be helpful for students to understand that the past was inherently different than the present. For example, students might just call someone living when slavery was prevalent stupid because they should have known better, but in this historical person's time slavery was not seen as a bad thing.

With this in mind, my thoughts are that students can create a Twitter account and then assume the perspective of someone in history. This would not be just a random person though. A lesson like this would tackle a specific time in history. For example, with the Crusades a set number of students could be Crusaders, Muslims, and one maybe two students could take the perspective of the Pope. The students would then over the course of a week tweet out things that the role are assuming would say two to three times a day. To make it easier to track as a teacher I could also create a specific hashtag for the students to attach so that they and I could easily see the "big picture" of what was going on at the time.

Essentially, students would creating pseudo-primary documents. Doing this would show me how well students understand the different roles of people in a certain period of time as well as be a succinct writing exercise for students. Furthermore, this could easily be expanded to other classes at my placement school or even other schools in the area. There are some possible drawbacks though: Students' parents would have to be okay with social media, students would need to learn Twitter if they don't already know about it, or students might not have internet access at home to tweet out everyday. These would prove to be speed bumps in the lesson plan, but I feel this could certainly be worked around in some way. Let me know what you think!

9 comments:

  1. Hi Carl!
    I love your tech teach-in idea and I am really eager to see how well it plays out in your classroom. When my webinar group was researching Twitter, and we came across the usage of Twitter to create a Twitter page for a historical figure, I thought that this would be perfect for teaching World History because there are so many more figures historically world wide at one given point (vs. the US). Regarding the possible issues/concerns that you had, do you think that it would be helpful to check in advance with students regarding Twitter usage? You could do that as an exit poll a week in advance to determine if you will need to accommodate for this. If there are a fair amount that are unfamiliar with Twitter, you could pair up an experienced user with an in-experienced user. This would also cut down on the number of historical figures you need to come up with. I hope the students enjoy the activity!

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  2. This is a very nice idea, Carl, and I appreciate your rationale for exploring this direction. It certainly seems like a reasonable bet, for example, that an activity like this could enhance students' sense of historical empathy, given that the core of the activity would be--at least in part--trying to see these historical actors as actual people. I use simulation in a lot of my teaching, and one thing I try to do (and that I would recommend to you as a formative and/or summative assessment) is asking the students to take some kind of "step back" moment and write about why they had their character say whatever they had her say. In that sense, they're giving you a kind of tour of this collection of what you've dub "pseudo-primary documents." I'll be eager to hear how this plays out, Carl.

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  3. Carl,
    I think you have a great idea for your technology tech-in. I really not familiar with Twitter (I don’t have an account) but I can imagine that students would be very engaged and motivated to do this lesson. In my Biology class, my mentor teacher had a homework assignment based on Twitter. In this assignment, students had to pretend to be a biomolecule and write down on paper (not actually tweet) three tweets with a hashtag. The students were really creative and my mentor teacher told me she that some student “tweets” had her laughing aloud. I can imagine and hope that your students will be as eager and imaginative as well. I think Sam made a lot of practical suggestions in her comments to your post. I was wondering if you had the resources in your school such as a computer lab or laptops that could be checked out for your classroom so that students would have access to technology during class time and you could give your students an opportunity to tweet.

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  4. Carl,
    I think you have a great idea for your technology tech-in. I really not familiar with Twitter (I don’t have an account) but I can imagine that students would be very engaged and motivated to do this lesson. In my Biology class, my mentor teacher had a homework assignment based on Twitter. In this assignment, students had to pretend to be a biomolecule and write down on paper (not actually tweet) three tweets with a hashtag. The students were really creative and my mentor teacher told me she that some student “tweets” had her laughing aloud. I can imagine and hope that your students will be as eager and imaginative as well. I think Sam made a lot of practical suggestions in her comments to your post. I was wondering if you had the resources in your school such as a computer lab or laptops that could be checked out for your classroom so that students would have access to technology during class time and you could give your students an opportunity to tweet.

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  5. Hey Carl,
    this idea seems to have been effective on many different occasions. I have read some posts from edubloggers where they document the process and results of such assignments. If it has worked for others, why not try it yourself! This assignment certainly extends instruction to outside the classroom and it seems to be a good way to promote empathy and perspective-taking as well as to teach history. What I wonder, though, is to what extent students can exhibit their knowledge in just a short tweet. When that speaker in 504 gave a presentation about how his students compressed shakespearean works into a 6-second vine, I wondered whether or not such an assignment trivializes the works and sort of "misses the target." I wonder the same about these twitter assignments. Still sounds fun, nonetheless.

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  6. Hey Carl,
    this idea seems to have been effective on many different occasions. I have read some posts from edubloggers where they document the process and results of such assignments. If it has worked for others, why not try it yourself! This assignment certainly extends instruction to outside the classroom and it seems to be a good way to promote empathy and perspective-taking as well as to teach history. What I wonder, though, is to what extent students can exhibit their knowledge in just a short tweet. When that speaker in 504 gave a presentation about how his students compressed shakespearean works into a 6-second vine, I wondered whether or not such an assignment trivializes the works and sort of "misses the target." I wonder the same about these twitter assignments. Still sounds fun, nonetheless.

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  8. Carl, being that we've been talking about this Twitter lesson idea for about a month now, I'm interested to see how you've fleshed it out on your blog post. I'm excited to meet with you more to talk about how we can get our classrooms to collaborate on this project. I like how you describe the various benefits to this lesson, but you also provide some major caveats to the lesson. These are issues that we will have to talk about together and with our mentor teachers, but I am confident that we can create a successful Twitter lesson to get students engaged with historical character-taking on a platform that they are (hopefully)familiar with.

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  9. Carl, I know exactly what you mean when you say "Twitter seems to be calling." I have always had a hoot and half writing tweets on my personal account. I think I have been able to express some of my most intelligent thoughts via this medium and I think my students would too. I think one reason this is so, is because the small character limit really makes me think about my word choice. I can really focus on what I am trying to say instead of trying to fill in space like I sometimes do when writing essays. I do worry however, that students will not be able to get their ideas or perspectives across in that small amount of words. How many tweets do students have to write for the assignment? Also are they going to be given an example of what you expect for these tweets? I think being really explicit with your prompt and project parameters will make this assignment really effective. I guess one final question I have is whether or not students get to pick their own person to write as, and whether or not they can use their own personal twitters for the assignment? Sorry about all of these questions, I think I am just really excited about it! I can't wait for you to implement it!

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