**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**
A guest post by Craig Kemp
This year as I reflect on 4 terms of amazing learning within my school here in Singapore I asked the students about their highlights. Using twitter in the classroom was one of those.
This year we trialled the use of Twitter as a tool to support student learning in the classroom. One major impact was its use in the development of a new modern learning environment that is currently being implemented ready for the 2015 school year.
I asked the students involved a little bit about their use of Twitter to dig a little deeper into what makes them tick when learning through Social Media. Here are some of their responses:
- I remember the thrill of getting instant replies
- I loved the ideas that we got from people from all over the world
- The ideas we got from other students and teachers were amazing because we didn’t think of them but they were so great and we are using them in the design of our learning environment
- It was a great way to see other people’s opinions
- It felt a little strange at first because we didn’t know who we were talking to, but once we read their profiles we felt more comfortable
- It was really exciting because there were so many different ideas and opinions to choose from
- People that replied to our questions were friendly and kind
- Everyone was willing to help
- Within an hour we got to ask more than 15 questions and get answers to all of them
- We got several links, videos and articles to help us with our research in a 1 hour lesson
- It was amazing to connect with other students and teachers who have been through the same situation as us
- We made some connections that wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t used Social Media
- We discussed ideas with a designer that we ended up connecting with via Google Hangouts
This post originally appeared on Mr. Kemp’s blog, and was republished with permission.
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Craig is a New Zealand born educator with over 10 years experience both in the classroom and in leadership. He is an enthusiastic, 21st century change agent that is passionate about every aspect of education and making a difference.
I love seeing my students get excited and learning from other people’s opinions and comments. Twitter is a great tool for the classroom.
I’ve found a tool called GroupTweet that allows my students to all easily Tweet from our classroom account. I find it works much better than simply using a hashtag as students can simply follow tweets from the class account instead of having to setup hashtag searches or follow every other student in the class.