Reflection

1. Jennifer Chang Wathall
Date: 6th February, 2017
Reflection for Module 4
Searching for Innovative Uses of Technology
Too Many to Choose From!
This week I researched about how Twitter can be used in the classroom as an
instructional strategy and also how to use it to find math resources. I have my on
Twitter account, which I use it as a professional platform to share ideas, articles
and news about my workshops. I follow educators from around the world that I
respect and want to hear from. These include Dan Meyer, Jo Boaler and Mike
Ollerton to name a few. I also use Twitter to get instant access to up to date news
items. BBC and CNN update by the minute so very often you will hear news on
Twitter before even the news channel websites.
What surprised me this week was the power of using Twitter for the classroom. I
list some great ideas here to remind myself to try these out:
• Use twitter to create a list: this could be all the questions students have
about a particular topic or everyone has to write what they know about a
math topic- no repeats.
• Live tweet field trips or presentations given by students in class
• Pose one question (more open rather than closed) and ask students to
respond with original ideas
• Connect classroom from around the world. Students can collaborate and
use Twitter as a communication tool (short and succinct)
• Facilitates research as often there are links to artless and blog posts
• Poll opinions using an integration with Survey Monkey or just use Twitter
Poll
• Communicate with expert in a particular field to collect primary data
• Ask students to use the web to find online resources for a particular topic
and share on Twitter. Once a resource has been share students have to
find another one to share.
• Digital diary of an excursion or experience. Using a hash tag you can input
text, upload photos and videos to track the journey.
• Use Twitter to make important announcement or updates
• At the end of a lesson ask students to summarize the key concepts in the
form of a headline (Visible Thinking Routine from Harvard’s Project Zero)
no longer than 140 characters!
These are just a few wonderful suggestions and I can now see the power of
Twitter for the classroom setting.