Twitter and Me

I didn't even know what Twitter was until my wife showed me. She would always be on her Twitter account following everyone and sharing what celebrities would be saying about their day. I thought that it was stupid to just be able to read what people had on their minds or what they were going to do for their day. So I never bothered to create an account because I was satisfied with my Facebook account. One day my wife told me that she had made me a Twitter account and gave me my password and told me to go on and check it out. So I did and I have to admit that it was pretty interesting reading some of the posts on Twitter made by celebrities and friends. Then one of my friends told me to start using Twitter for news sources, and I did. I learn more about the news from Twitter than I do from any other source, because I have no time to sit and watch the news on TV. I work full time and go to school full time so I just get on my Twitter and check out the news from there.

When my SEDU 183 class started I thought I knew pretty much everything there is to know about Twitter and how it operates and I was wrong. This class has taught me so much about Twitter and the uses of it inside and outside the classroom. I have learned that as a teacher I could use Twitter for exams and quizzes. I could also use Twitter for discussions that we will be having during class and that will give all of my students an opportunity to participate and to speak their own mind. I will definitely use Twitter for parent/teacher conferences, because I know how hard it is to be a parent and sometimes parents to want to go to the school to sit down and talk with the teacher about their child's progress. So they could sit at home together as a family and we could hold the conference on Twitter. This past Tuesday our class participated on taking our first quiz online using Twitter and with little instructions we worked together and figured out how to successfully take and hopefully pass our quiz. So if we can do it, then anyone can use Twitter as a resource for their classroom.

I am going to be a High School Social Studies teacher and I will definitely be using Twitter and other online sources to give quizzes and exams and to hold discussions during class. I don't want to be the boring teacher who lectures all class period and all year, because kids won't learn from that and they will be bored very easily. I want to use to new ideas and technology in my classroom so that my students can participate, work together, and give their own opinion without saying what someone else said. I am very excited to use these new ideas in my classroom and I have already started of thinking about ways I can incorporate Twitter and technology to get my students to the educational level that I will want them to succeed at.

The Final Frontier

For our assignment we showed that teachers need to have and use technology in their classrooms in order to be up to date with the technology generation and to succeed as a teacher. Peggy Ertmer's article discusses how teachers knowledge and beliefs are different, because whereas beliefs generally refer to “suppositions, commitments, and ideologies,” knowledge refers to “factual propositions and understandings.” Collaboration is key to success because more heads working together are better than just one head working alone. Most people work better when they are working in teams than by themselves. The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and their technology practices. We used the google drive and the internet to show people how easy it is to use technology and if we can figure this out then I am pretty sure anybody can do it. We all three put in an equal amount of work as Stephen worked on writing the slides. I worked on finding the pictures, videos, and graphs and putting them into the slides. Kyle worked on the transitions of all the slides. Now take a look at our final draft and enjoy!