Me and Twitter

Follow @deondrayivey

I first started using Twitter for personal-social reasons. At first i didn't like it because I was used to Facebook's layout of posts, comments and pictures. Twitter at first seems like everyone's random thoughts with other people's comments all mixed up in one place. Even thought that is basically twitter people start to get used to it and then it seems normal. The battle between Facebook and Twitter for the best social-network is still going on. 

In my education class SEDU183 we are learning to incorporate twitter and other technological help into the classroom for teachers to use.  These classroom twitter activities have helped me enjoy twitter more by interacting with the class and teacher via twitter.  It makes work more fun and productive learning how hashtags (#) and other things can connect people of a common interest. 


For example the class had an entire group sessions at arranged times to talk about different topics by tweeting and adding #SEDU183 to every tweet.  This could be used by teachers in a Community of Practice.  Anyone who sees one of the tweets can join in if they want just by typing the same hashtag.
*Join the Conversation here

Tweet #SEDU183 

Today we took a silent group test to use test our twitter skills and group knowledge.  To communicate with each other we were allowed to talk within #SEDU183quiz1. This was entertaining in a way and very much thought provoking.  It lead me to think of ways to incorporate social-networking into my future classroom.  Maybe I'll have my class collaborate on project and homework over twitter or whichever new social network rises by that time.  Maybe ill even create my own website/social-network designed just for student collaboration through projects and other assignments.

The Final Frontier

Me and three of my piers were asked to research if technology helped classrooms based on Peggy A. Ertmer's article, "Teacher Pedagogical Beliefs: The Final Frontier in Our Quest for Technology Integration" Here is our final project.
The article is about the effects of integrating technology into a classroom.  Many issues are discussed such as: the teacher's abilities to use these new technologies, Student's performance with technology, and even the student's attention span.  The most important issue is Teacher's not being exposed to the technology that the children of this generation are used to using almost all day long; for example cell phones were as ordinary to have for children 12 years old while teachers who have been teaching for a career for a while now (probably around 30 or more years or age) did not have a cell phone until they were grown up with their own job to pay for it.  The article also talked about collaboration vs cooperation.  A great point made was that in a collaboration participants all work together step by step in an combined effort; as opposed to cooperation where participants split up a task and solve each problem on their own, missing out on parts of the hands on experience.

The collaboration was a great way to solve research this topic because as we worked together whenever one person did not know how to solve a problem or had question they could just ask a group member and 90% of the time the question would be easily answered.  A great way to say this, two heads are better then one but in this case four heads are better than one. I actually enjoyed working on this project and learning more on the aspects of teaching.