A little bird told me …

This must be the definitive list of ideas on how to use Twitter in Education. In fact, it is a very good overview of Twitter in general with some very specific ideas for devolping the concepts behind the twitter community into something useful for students, teachers and their relationships.

Have a look: http://tinyurl.com/cnq89x8

If you have experience using Twitter with students would love to hear from you. It is not something I have really tried yet. I have to say I am a little behind and not completely convinced on using social networks with my groups as they seem to have so little time outside of class to get involved. Maybe that is the problem, I just need to make the experience useful and attractive enough.

Flipping out

In many posts I have mentioned online tools which could be interesting as a means of setting students homework, creating online cartoons, recordings etc which can later be looked at and discussed in class. Here is another idea which is in vogue but which takes the whole concept of what happens at home / in class to a different level.

Try flipping your class. Forget those up-front presentations. Record them (powerpoint, video, audio, slide presentation etc) and put them online, on your blog for example. Let the students work through the presentation at home. That frees you up in class for much more interesting work be it practice or student feedback on the work they did at home.

Have yet to put it into practice but love the idea and how it could help make classroom time all the more useful and rich. Follow these two links for a little more on the area:

http://flipped-learning.com/

http://marynabadenhorst.global2.vic.edu.au/2010/04/01/to-flip-or-not-to-flip/

Projectiles

Like many teachers I get tied into my coursebook and curriculum, exams etc but recently have had some space to work on mini projects with my young teenagers. Wonderful to be reminded how rich the language input/output can be when they are involved in something that catches their imagination! A dogme moment -)

Another curiosity was that when I introduced the concept of the project and what we were going to do, there was initial disbelief that the first stage did not involve switching on Google and doing some “research” or rather simple “search”. I know from my own daughter’s projects how they all start with Google for images and Wikipedia for content (with some music videos on Youtube is nobody is watching). Lots of cutting and pasting and lots of parential involvement from supervising internet, to printing, to buying glue and pizzas so the group do not starve along the way.

Once they got over the initial shock, my own students did manage to create some content all by themselves. On the subject of how IT can be blended or even welded into education, Nik Peachey gave this interview at the IATEFL conference http://tinyurl.com/d3ft2qz .There are lots more fascinating recordings from speakers at IATEFL on the same site.

Stringed along

One of the simplest concordencing tools I have come across

http://nav.stringnet.org/