https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
So the other night, in our EDUC 504 class we had a guest speaker, Tom Ward, who had a lot to say about technology in the classroom. He showed us some awesome ways Vine can be used in the classroom. Students would only have 6 seconds to make a video to support a prompt. I really like that idea because it helps students become concise. I also recalled on an idea that I stole from an English teacher about using twitter to post summaries to text because twitter only allows a certain numbers of characters. This word limit is great discipline to help students learn to be concise.
However, the moment Tom Ward mentioned this thing called TweetDeck...I was lost. I bet Naomi, who was sitting next to me, thought I was being extremely rude- but I was fascinated at this twitter organization idea that Tom Ward shared. My BIGGESt issue with Twitter was that all these tweets were ALL OVER the place....and I literally had to SURF through tweets to find something "cool" or "interesting" related to education; that's because I just started following the NSTA, Edutopia, NGSS and the Common Core Michigan. As Tom went on with his presentation, I immediately went to TweetDeck and organized my tweets, shown in the picture above. It REALLY makes the twitter experience a lot more bearable! As you can see in the picture, I can look through, say the NGSS tweets simultaneously as NSTA tweets are posted. THIS IS AMAZING. Thanks so much Tom for introducing this to us/me! I also think my energy drink might have given me extra enthusiasm for the TweetDeck, but I still find it awesome!
Yo yo, Tedawwwwldi
ReplyDeleteNice post, brah.
I thought Mr. Ward's vignettes of how he leverages vine in the classroom were super cool. Until his presentation I had been dismissing vine as another manifestation of what I see to be a slight degeneration of society. Along with the obsession over selfies, pictures of food, and North West, I despised these 6-second videos that suddenly began populating my Facebook feed (I didn't even have vine and the things had rooted themselves in the one social networking site I did use!). I was of the opinion that they were contributing to the dumbing of society. In my eyes they fulfilled our ever-increasing need for the quick fix. It seems that few media are gripping anymore unless what they present is necessarily ephemeral. I often see tl;dr in comment sections (too long didn't read). People don't have time to read the whole thing because there are more 6-second vines to be watched. End rant.
Students love these media. It seems everyone has a vine and is constantly connected to his / her peers. Instead of trying to eradicate the ubiquitous technology, Tom Ward leveraged it in his favor. He knew students like using vine, so he used it to an educational end. The math examples were particularly nice, I thought. You mention that the brevity of the videos force students to be concise. While this may be true, it also forces them to omit a lot of information. I think it's a huge injustice to, say, a Shakespeare play to sum it up in 6-seconds. Sure, plot may be summed up so quickly, but a teacher would be remiss to have his / her students only talking about plot.