<< 21st Century Classroom - YouTube for Integrators and Developers
Cell phones are becoming a part of young people’s bodies just like texting has surely woven itself into the fabric of student life. Nearly all the smartphone users(students) use their cell phones for social networking and browsing the internet and to know how much the children of today are in love with their mobile devices, we don’t need to look at any survey report, it’s all around us. But I was really shocked to find out that there are roughly 72 per cent of students in all over the Ontario and 68 per cent of students in Toronto District School Board who are in their teens and are not in the favor of using cell phones as an educational tool (cp24.com).
For many 21st century educators, the result of this survey may look very depressing. However, in my opinion this is a great window of opportunity for engaging students in educational activities through the toys they love the most. If Facebook, Tweeter and Google+ are the top most applications used by K-12 students then what is stopping us from leveraging the same or similar applications to engage students in educational activities? It is just a matter of knowing the interests of our students and then formulating and rethinking our techniques of educating them.
Innovative teachers would be delighted to find out that how effective a cellphone could be within and outside their classrooms. Cellphones together with Twitter, Google+ and Blogger can transform the 21st century classroom by engaging young students in classroom instruction through the applications that they use every day.
Twitter
On surface, Twitter’s Microblog, the 140-character long mini blog post, seems to be of little help in classrooms. If exploited properly, this tool can become a strong ally for teachers.
Keeping K-12 students off social media sites and focused on the course material is the biggest challenge for 21st century educators, and Twitter is the tool which responds to this challenge. Through this tool educators can harness the power of today’s technologies and students’ inclination towards social media sites to enhance the learning experience rather than distract from it.
There are countless benefits of bringing Twitter in classroom and some of them are as follows:
Blogger
Sometimes, blogs are overlooked as a tool for communication and collaboration with compare to social networking sites, but blogs are far more superior to social networking sites to enrich communication and collaboration in education sector. This is why blogs are increasingly becoming an effective source of interaction between teachers, students and student administrators. Here is how:
Google+
As a matter of fact, teens and young adults are the most active internet users on the planet. They are also the biggest abuser of the internet as well (McAfee). According to the report, this behavior of teens has a lot to do with social network as it says in the report: “Parents are blind to how much teens check social networks”.
Most of the social networks let teens use their websites if they are at the tender age of 13 or above. Before, young teens could go on to internet and subscribe to a social network without their parents knowing, I think it will be an awesome opportunity if teachers could bring their students on Google+. This can for sure enhance student’s learning experience and will give a peace of mind to parents.
Google + has become the social network of choice for educators since Google launched it for Google Apps for Education and following are few ways this app can be used in classroom:
Gmail
All of the above applications can be used to leverage project-based and collaborative learning. But in real life people tend to use even more applications than I mentioned above. And to manage all the communication or collaboration based applications individually can become a tedious job. So, to make communication and collaboration simple; we need a powerful yet a simple tool which can consolidate and harness the power of all the possible communication and collaboration based tools teachers or students can use, and that is an email system or Gmail, which has been widely adopted by education sector because of its simplicity.
Almost all the collaboration and communication based applications exist today let their users set email alerts on different kind of application specific activities. This way teachers and students can stay in-sync with the activities happening on each application they are using, hence consolidating and gluing all the applications together through one application. Following are few ways this app can be used in classroom.
The silicon chip which exists on the simplest cellphone today is far more superior and powerful than the chip that existed on lunar module, which made landing on moon possible. And if we can harness the power of this chip effectively we can definitely cause a breakthrough in our education system.
21st Century Classroom - Raspberry Pi – Putting it together >>
In my future posts I shall further explore the scope of technology in the field of education. Subscribe to my blog, or follow me on twitter, to keep track of these posts.
For many 21st century educators, the result of this survey may look very depressing. However, in my opinion this is a great window of opportunity for engaging students in educational activities through the toys they love the most. If Facebook, Tweeter and Google+ are the top most applications used by K-12 students then what is stopping us from leveraging the same or similar applications to engage students in educational activities? It is just a matter of knowing the interests of our students and then formulating and rethinking our techniques of educating them.
Innovative teachers would be delighted to find out that how effective a cellphone could be within and outside their classrooms. Cellphones together with Twitter, Google+ and Blogger can transform the 21st century classroom by engaging young students in classroom instruction through the applications that they use every day.
On surface, Twitter’s Microblog, the 140-character long mini blog post, seems to be of little help in classrooms. If exploited properly, this tool can become a strong ally for teachers.
Keeping K-12 students off social media sites and focused on the course material is the biggest challenge for 21st century educators, and Twitter is the tool which responds to this challenge. Through this tool educators can harness the power of today’s technologies and students’ inclination towards social media sites to enhance the learning experience rather than distract from it.
There are countless benefits of bringing Twitter in classroom and some of them are as follows:
- Keep your students updated through tweets about deadlines, assignments, or even explanatory notes for a topic that students might find difficult.
- Parents no longer have to fuss about whether their kid is doing all her homework. They may just like to follow the teachers’ tweets to stay in touch.
- Teachers may want to incorporate Twitter in lessons that track hash tags for another interesting lesson.
- Those 40 or so minutes never seem enough when an interesting discussion erupts in a classroom. Teachers often have to cut that short for want of time. With Twitter, time is no longer an issue, the same discussion can be continued with the help of the microblog!
- Students can take or share notes and can save a lot of trees.
- Teachers and students can sync their Twitter account with their blogs.
- IT IS A LOT OF FUN!
Blogger
Sometimes, blogs are overlooked as a tool for communication and collaboration with compare to social networking sites, but blogs are far more superior to social networking sites to enrich communication and collaboration in education sector. This is why blogs are increasingly becoming an effective source of interaction between teachers, students and student administrators. Here is how:
- Teachers can communicate and engage their students in various activities that may not be possible within a classroom given the limited time slots.
- Students who are otherwise not much motivated learners can be made active participants in the learning activities.
- Blogs can help students to improve their reflective writing skills.
- Traditionally, students write their essays just to get them graded by teachers. They sure would like to put their best foot forward if they know that their writings will be read not only by their teachers, but also by other students, and general readers.
- This would also help students in improving their reading skills.
- Teacher might as well put some essays on blogger for peer correction. However, anonymity is important while doing so in order to save students from embarrassment.
- It can be used as a forum for discussions.
- It allows for scaffolded learning as well.
- To top it all, teachers can review students’ blogposts in advance to filter out the stuff they think as inappropriate.
- IT IS A LOT OF FUN!
Google+
As a matter of fact, teens and young adults are the most active internet users on the planet. They are also the biggest abuser of the internet as well (McAfee). According to the report, this behavior of teens has a lot to do with social network as it says in the report: “Parents are blind to how much teens check social networks”.
Most of the social networks let teens use their websites if they are at the tender age of 13 or above. Before, young teens could go on to internet and subscribe to a social network without their parents knowing, I think it will be an awesome opportunity if teachers could bring their students on Google+. This can for sure enhance student’s learning experience and will give a peace of mind to parents.
Google + has become the social network of choice for educators since Google launched it for Google Apps for Education and following are few ways this app can be used in classroom:
- Teachers and students can share content, i.e. photos, videos and audio recordings taken from their cell phones.
- Poll is another exciting feature that teachers can use not only to choose their student representatives, but also to find out the general opinion about various issues.
- Detailed messages can be exchanged through Google +.
- Teachers and students can create pages to interlink their Blogs and Twitter.
- The difference between friends, acquaintances and strangers is a crucial one, especially for teens. Google + includes circles to help people to manage their different relationships.
- Google+ Hangouts feature bring people together using live multi-person video. Connecting face-to-face is an added advantage that may simulate classroom setting as well.
- IT IS A LOT OF FUN!
Gmail
All of the above applications can be used to leverage project-based and collaborative learning. But in real life people tend to use even more applications than I mentioned above. And to manage all the communication or collaboration based applications individually can become a tedious job. So, to make communication and collaboration simple; we need a powerful yet a simple tool which can consolidate and harness the power of all the possible communication and collaboration based tools teachers or students can use, and that is an email system or Gmail, which has been widely adopted by education sector because of its simplicity.
Almost all the collaboration and communication based applications exist today let their users set email alerts on different kind of application specific activities. This way teachers and students can stay in-sync with the activities happening on each application they are using, hence consolidating and gluing all the applications together through one application. Following are few ways this app can be used in classroom.
- Keep track of your new followers, quitters, search results, and tweets from your favorite lists in your twitter summary.
- Keep an eye on your tweets, replies, retweets, and DMs without leaving your inbox.
- Manage the moderation of comments for your blogposts.
- Get email alerts for new blogposts on your favourite blogs.
- Keep track of the replies on your comments.
- Track your Google+ pages, +1, posts, comments, insights, friend requests, news feeds, recommendations, events, messages, and a lot more, without leaving your inbox.
- IT’S A LOT OF FUN!
The silicon chip which exists on the simplest cellphone today is far more superior and powerful than the chip that existed on lunar module, which made landing on moon possible. And if we can harness the power of this chip effectively we can definitely cause a breakthrough in our education system.
21st Century Classroom - Raspberry Pi – Putting it together >>
In my future posts I shall further explore the scope of technology in the field of education. Subscribe to my blog, or follow me on twitter, to keep track of these posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your comments are highly appreciated!