Tag Archives: twitter

Teaching Twitter to Teachers

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To tweet is human.pptx
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Recently I decided to start running some more informal relaxed training sessions at school for staff.  Not the sort of official ‘boring’ ones where staff have to learn how to do mail merge but fun ones like YouTube and Twitter.

So for this week’s Twitter sessions I set out with an easy aim – I wasn’t trying to convert teachers into using Twitter extensively but instead just show them how it worked and some of the benefits it can bring.  I wrote the PowerPoint which is attached to the blog as the basis for the lesson and it proved to be reasonably successful as a resource.  I sometimes write PowerPoints which don’t end up getting used for one reason or another so it felt good to use one properly.  Of course it could be improved even further but at least I’ve got one I can revisit.

As for the training itself that went reasonably well.  I had 4 in one session and a single person in another session which for my school is a good turnout.  All staff bar one either had a Twitter account or set one up in the session.  We went through most of the basic features including @replies, DM’s, Hashtags and favourites.  Some staff asked some pretty specific questions which showed that they were taking it all in.

None of the staff since the sessions have tweeted again but I’m not concerned about that.  I at least managed to educate people about Twitter so that it is something which is less ‘alien’ to them and therefore I think it will increase the chance of them possibly getting into Twitter at the right time.

Till next time …

ps: Don’t you just love alliteration?

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Developing an effective teaching solution during snow closure

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Our school site says we might be open on Monday however looking at the
weather report this may be a bit unlikely (or will open just with very
few pupils). Now the three days of snow have meant that I have missed
about four hours of GCSE teaching and about five hours of A level
teaching. This is quite concerning as exams and coursework becomes
quite urgent.

So this blog is a bit of a thought exercise on how to deliver lessons
with pupils and teachers both stuck at home. The following ideas are
designed for my own school.

Two points to consider:

1 – we don’t currently have Moodle installed and we are unlikely to
install anything similar. I am not sold on moodle in any case partly
due to the second point below.
2 – I am looking for services or websites which teachers and students
can use which are not hosted or managed by the school. This is I think
a necessary strategy to ensure that in the case of extreme weather
lessons can continue without relying on the school.

So how to do it?

1 – firstly students need a central point to which they can go which
lists all the teachers in the school and what services those teachers
use. This is because I think some teachers may use more than one
website than other teachers. For example I could be using, Edmodo,
posterous and Twitter whilst another teacher could just be using
Posterous.
2 – secondly use free services like posterous or edmodo. Both I have
only recently come across and they work an absolute treat for
organising lessons and delivering content.

Certainly at the very minimum teachers could use edmodo to notify
students of what they ate doing on posterous. Posterous itself could
then contain the nuts and bolts of a lesson. With the ability to
rapidly upload content of just about any type teachers can rapidly
push out content to students.

The killer feature of posterous though is the ability to create ‘sub’
blogs to which students can submit their own work too. This would
allow teachers to pretty rapidly get work back from students and allow
those same students to comment on each others work.

Ultimately doing something like this to support lessons is quite
tricky and will run into teething problems. But if it has the support
of the school and the students it could very easily continue to
provide educational value to students during situations like school
closures due to snow.

Twitter in Education

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Having rediscovered the joys of twitter these last two weeks I have been thinking about how it could be used effectively within a school context.

What is twitter to me? I see it as a form of communication which is only slightly removed from traditional IM. It’s almost like a non real-time chat session where you can shout all you like about something without caring whether anyone hears it or not. (but most people do care)

Traditional IM can be used quite effectively within a school context but its weakness is that without the other person you wish to communicate with being signed your only option is to use an email. Most emails within a school either fall into the short category or the too long winded to really be effective (guilty of that myself)

Twitter has a number of advantages over IM an email. Its brevity forces people to get their message across quickly – and the asyncrhonous nature of the conversation means that the message can be sent regardless of who is there to read it.

So where can it be used? I was reading today abou the boy who was attacked with a claw hammer at a school in Swindon (http://tinyurl.com/cbrq5b). Those sorts of situations are hard enough to deal with (and for starters they should have had more teachers on patrol) but if all teachers had been equipped with devices that allowed them to twitter to a private network and had during the months proceeding the attack been twittering about any incidents of racial tension in the corridors the senior staff may have had enough intelligence (and im talking in the spy sense, not the stupid sense) to know that an issue was brewing.

So what should this private twitter network look like?

1. For starters it would be a local implementation of a twitter server – not connected in any way to twitter.com itself.
2. All staff would be equipped with mobile devices that had the schools twitter service built into it (palm pre?) and all pc’s on the network would have the login built in for staff.
3. The twitter stream would be readable only by staff and not by students (although possibly students could post to it – could be a way for bullied students to alert someone)
4. The twitter application interface would be very simple – hit an icon on the mobile device and up pops a twitter box (identification is based on the login)
5. System also identifies which other senior teachers are online and watching the feed
6. Possibly have a drop down box as well containing short template tweets to allow for teachers to quickly tweet something useful (eg: trouble in east corridor)
7. Once a tweet is sent it appears on the feed which senior staff are monitoring
8. senior staff member identifies an immeadiate problem and responds with what action they will take
9. non essential tweets are logged and analysed

In a large secondary school where issues can develop very quickly (and where staff may not have the time or energy to file a paper based report) this could be a useful way for staff on patrol and staff in lessons to quickly notify other staff of any potential issues.

It has its problems – mobile devices would be an issue as well as the possibility that no senior staff could be watching the feed at any one time. However despite those I think a system like this could possibly work.
6. Tweets are automatically sent to senior staff computers (wi