Here is my presentation for our end of class assignment.
http://www.slideshare.net/JustinWelty%22%3EJustin
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Tweeting intelligently
For the last post I decided to take a look at Twitter. This is something I have avoided, because I thought it was a useless form of social trash. However, I decided to sign up and see exactly what it was all about. Signing up is really easy, and with a smart phone you can do it from anywhere. The hardest part you will have is to figure out what your screen name should be. Some people use a form of their name, but if yours is Jim Smith, then you may have to pick something more obscure. For me I went with JayDubya83. Of course part of that had been used, so I had to add the 83 to make it work. After you have created your account, then all you have to do is start following people.
Following itself can be a tricky situation, because many time if you are looking for a celebrity, there may be more than one person using that name. For example, I searched Ricky Gervais, and there are at least eight that could be him, and another few that are updates, and news for Gervais. However, it looks like he only tweeted for a little while, then stopped. This is how a lot of people use Twitter, to follow celebrities, and keep up with the daily gossip. You can follow a few comedians if you want a few extra laughs of the day, or follow some of your favorite sports figures if you want to learn about them.
To use this for education might be a little easier than you may think. For one, the President has his own Twitter page. The social studies aspect of that would be easy to implement. If you search education, then you get pages like The Library of Congress, Teach for America, the Office of Educational Technology, and even Nasa. You could easily have your students follow these pages, and create charts that depict what students have learned from this. As an English teacher you could have them follow some of the authors on the web, like Neil Gaiman, JK Rowling, and Margaret Atwood.
Twitter may be a mostly social media for people to use a way to get themselves out there, but if an educator tries hard enough then they could find some practical applications. There's no reason to not use tools like this since the world of technology is ever changing, then so should the way we teach.
Following itself can be a tricky situation, because many time if you are looking for a celebrity, there may be more than one person using that name. For example, I searched Ricky Gervais, and there are at least eight that could be him, and another few that are updates, and news for Gervais. However, it looks like he only tweeted for a little while, then stopped. This is how a lot of people use Twitter, to follow celebrities, and keep up with the daily gossip. You can follow a few comedians if you want a few extra laughs of the day, or follow some of your favorite sports figures if you want to learn about them.
To use this for education might be a little easier than you may think. For one, the President has his own Twitter page. The social studies aspect of that would be easy to implement. If you search education, then you get pages like The Library of Congress, Teach for America, the Office of Educational Technology, and even Nasa. You could easily have your students follow these pages, and create charts that depict what students have learned from this. As an English teacher you could have them follow some of the authors on the web, like Neil Gaiman, JK Rowling, and Margaret Atwood.
Twitter may be a mostly social media for people to use a way to get themselves out there, but if an educator tries hard enough then they could find some practical applications. There's no reason to not use tools like this since the world of technology is ever changing, then so should the way we teach.
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