Ed Tech in Our Classrooms

This is me in my home office yesterday while I was serving as a panelist on a national webinar organized by the AACTE . The goal of the webinar was to help Education professors through their concerns about suddenly having to teach online.

While I have no social media presence, I was able to watch my cooperating teacher use Twitter for both classes and extracurricular activities. For classes, he associated  Twitter  with his Padlet so that students could acquire additional resources for his class by viewing his feed.  In addition to resources and content, he would also include fun things like student polls which would end up being shared across the entire school.  Polls such as “Snow Day vs No Snow Day” or even ridiculous topics such as “Pancakes vs Waffles.”  By including both of these kinds of content in his feed, students regularly check up and can even direct message him on there if they are unable to reach him via email. While I’m definitely not a social media kind of guy, I would consider creating a  Twitter  account for my classroom to enhance various experiences I have with my students.

My cat, Zinnie, does not like the Sphero robot I've been playing with this afternoon.

I watched the Edutopia video about using Twitter in classrooms [ Social Media: Making Connections Through Twitter ] as a way to make connections between schools and teachers in different areas of the country. When I first saw the title of this video, and not knowing what context Twitter was being used in the classroom, my first immediate thought was, “No way would I want Twitter being a source of technology within my classroom and with my students.” However, when I realized classroom teachers are using it as a way to share their lessons with other teachers, and gain more knowledge and activity ideas from these other classes, I changed my mind. I had never thought of how Twitter could be used to create threads of exciting class activities, pictures, videos, etc. Personally, I see more of Instagram and Pinterest being used, but I think Twitter could also be in there in the social media platforms teachers use to share on and make connections.  Even though I am only in the...

Okay, I promised my students I would re-up my certification for Google Trainer. Box. Checked.