Thursday, February 25, 2010

Twitterific Tweachers

I have always believed that teachers should use the frameworks and tools they expect their student learners to use in their own professional learning. In January I contributed to the Red Beach School teacher only day and enjoyed seeing how Lesley and Sarah and their team used their students' "Powerful Learning" model as the framework for the staff professional development day. It prompted me to do more of it myself!

Conferences are a great place to try out new ideas (if the submissions committee is brave enough to select new ideas!!), so Lenva and I decided to present our Twitter workshop at Learning at School USING Twitter.

We set up a twitter account @nztweachers , and the entire presentation was a series of tweets and interactions with the tweets of others. Now the presentation is over, the twitter account remains as a stand-alone tutorial on using twitter for teaching and learning. If you scroll to the earliest tweets in the archives and work from bottom to top to have a resource you can use for yourself or recommend to others!

At one stage during the presentation students from Bucklands Beach Intermediate tweeted in their gems.

This is the blurb we gave to the conference committee:

Twitterific tweachers:

This workshop will be a lighthearted introduction to the use of twitter as a t(w)eaching and learning tool.

Twitter can be used to support the learning of teachers and students in every area of their lives.

It can be everything from an online supply of the latest pedagogical ideas and resources for the teacher, to a shopping extravaganza.

This workshop will be a twitterfest rather than a presentation and will certainly be different from any workshop you have attended before.

To get a headstart and connect with us before the workshop, join twitter.com and follow @dorothyjburt and @lenva and of course our workshop id @nztweachers

4 comments:

  1. My name Is Christie Odom and I am in Dr. Stranges EDM 310 class in Mobile, Alabama. I really liked reading about your ideas on twitter and education. I am majoring in education, and this is something that we all have been talking about a lot in class. Not only with twitter, though, but with facebook and other internet sites as well.

    I think it is really interesting that you all are doing a workshop just to explore twitter and show people what it is all about. To me, it is things like this that need to be done to show people that technology and the internet can be beneficial, not only for business, but for education as well! I would love to hear how the work shop goes.

    Our class blog is http://edm310.blogspot.com

    and my personal blog is http://odomchristieedm310.blogspot.com

    I am new blogging, so I love the ideas you have put out of your blog. By the end of March I will have a summary posted on my page of my thoughts of your blog! I really think it is great that you are holding this workshop for people, especially educators, and I hope it is a success.

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  2. Hi Christie, Thanks for introducing yourself. As you know from your own blog only a small percentage of readers take the time to leave any kind of message to say they were there. I am very impressed with the opportunity Dr Strange is giving his students at the University of South Alabama to prepare to be quality teachers of digital age students. You are very fortunate to be part of this. I only wish New Zealand pre-service teachers had this opportunity. In fact I am quite wistful that we participate in the training programme of your University but our own Universities in NZ are disinterested!
    Make the most of this fabulous experience.

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  3. Hello, My name is Tim Mai and I am currently a student at the University of South Alabama. I am a History and Secondary Education major were I am taking EDM 310 with Dr. Strange. Here is a link to our class blog. http://edm310.blogspot.com/ My assignment will be to summarize various posts about your blog on my own blog. The assignment will be posted on March 21, 2010. Here is a link to my blog.
    http://maitimothyedm310.blogspot.com/

    Thank you very much and I look forward to reading your blogs.

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  4. @Tim Thanks for visiting this blog and the feedback you have left. I am very envious of the course offered by Dr Strange at the University of South Alabama and often tell people about it. We have nothing like it in New Zealand that I am aware of. Everyone who graduates from this course should have a very rounded overview of
    a. How eLearning is currently happening in schools - from both the students and teacher perspectives
    b. A truly global awareness of education because he directs you all to look beyond the shores of the USA to see what the rest of the world is doing.

    Make the most of it!

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