Friday Chat: Listening to Students about Technology

The Friday Chat (a new tradition here on TeachPaperless) goes live this Friday, May 22nd, at 1PM EST on http://todaysmeet.com/teachpaperless. Make it an end-of-the-week habit to stop by and join in the discussion. The discussions are archived on Today's Meet for 12 hours after the chat closes, and you are welcome to check out those archived editions and share.

This week's topic will be: Listening to Students about Technology.

Here's a link to a short video my students and I made related to their feelings and my observations about working in a paperless classroom. Might be a good starting point for discussion.

See you there!

High School Sophomores Weigh in on Using Twitter in the Classroom

Here are the views of a handful of my high school sophomores in Latin II talking about the use of Twitter in class. Leave it to kids to give you perspective.

Overall, I think Twitter is a great way to connect to each other in the classroom.... Twitter and other technology makes me feel more connected to the rest of classroom than I do in old-school classrooms. It makes the class more of a collaborative process than an individual one.

As a social networking site... not really my thing. But as an education tool, i think Twitter is a very helpful and useful site for the things we do in class, like lifelines on tests and class discussions. Overall I think that is a good tool for the classroom and we should keep using it.

I like using twitter on tests. It's helpful when you're stuck on a word or a phrase. I feel like I understand the translation better after someone helps me with it.

I personally like Twitter a lot. I think it's helpful on tests with communicating to each other about words we don't get. I like also using it outside school also for talking to friends and others, but in the classroom I find it extremely useful. I have heard of other teachers have started using this in class and I think it's great that they have used this innovative way of communicating in the classroom. I think next year we will also start to see more and more of teachers using this.

Twitter has some very good uses in the classroom. It allows us to constantly connect to each other like a giant classroom, but without the loud and constant noise [Ed -- The teacher next door might disagree re: the volume level of our noise!]. It also allows instant access to be able to help each other as well. The only problem is that it has a mind of its own. If it was a human being it would be bi-polar.

Twitter is sometimes really hard to follow. Everyone is constantly updating, and it gets a little chaotic. When you refresh the page, there are so many new posts and it gets really confusing.

I have to say that I like it. I was skeptical of it at first, but I think it could really help all of us in class. When it works, it is an easy way to connect with the other people in class. During our test last week, there were several times when I got stuck on part of my translation, and someone on twitter helped me out. I really like the idea of using Twitter as a lifeline, and I hope we will be able to use it on the final exam. I think it is cool that we are using Twitter, which is on the edge of the latest technology, for translating and understanding Latin, the language of the ancient world. This relationship shows that we can look to the future while still keeping in touch with the past, which is becoming increasingly difficult to do in today's modernized society.

Talking to Students

Just below this post is a comic I made for my students as a way to talk through a lot of the mumbo-jumbo of ed tech and Web 2.0.

Today we started each class with a brief discussion about what is working and what needs to be reconsidered in terms of tech in our courses. Almost unanimously the response was positive with regards to being paperless -- and this has been a stretch especially for my Seniors who aren't even part of the 1:1 program.

Things that came up through today's discussions:

1) Blogger is easy to use and well organized, but the occasional downtimes are frustrating. The one big negative was that a blog can get quickly filled up and ideas (and due dates) from old posts can get lost. To address this issue, each student now has a Google Cal fed directly through their blog. We've set them up so that students get reminders sent to their inbox a few days before assignments or long-term projects are due as well as the day before tests and quizzes.

2. Pixton is awesome. That's what all the kids are saying. It's super easy to use and the results are fantastic. We use it for reading checks as well as translating and vocab review. Because it's all online, the students can access it any time of day from where ever they are connected.

3. Google Docs is tough with more than two people on a doc at once. The students are used to IMs like those available on Facebook and have difficulty chatting with more than one person at a time. This makes live collaboration on Google Docs cumbersome. I'm going to look into getting each student set up with a Skype account. That way they'll be able to follow conference-call style IMing while working on the Google Doc seperately. I'll keep you all up to date on how this works. From a teacher's point-of-view, Google Docs is an excellent way to track group projects as well as give translation and short answer assessments; I can really watch in real-time as each student in class works on the assignment and I'm able to break in and help with problems as they arise rather than wait until after the assignment has been turned in to find errors.

It's really important to remember who we're working for here. It's the kids who are using this stuff on a daily basis in class and the kids who are using this stuff on a nightly basis for homework. Not to mention all of the other tech stuff they use in gaming and social networking. So, we need to listen to them. They are in a unique position to gauge the value of any particular piece of technology.

Authentic Learning

A high-school Freshman writes:

I'm a little excited, because today I just requested from the Pixton guy that he make a marble column, because it would help our class with Latin, and he did it. He sent me a confirmation and there is now a column object that we can use! That will help make it look more like Rome!

Communication. Responsiveness. Vision. Creating the future. Filling the needs of the present. Community. This is authentic learning in the 21st century.