A Drill that Would Have Been Impossible Just a Few Years Back...

...yet is totally commonplace in my class these days.

Here's the exact text of a 15 minute drill I gave to my Latin class this morning. They are each responsible for keeping a reference library of resources related to mythology and Roman history, and we are preparing these personal reference libraries in preparation for the Mid-Term exam.

I'm not going to comment on the drill except to say that this is the sort of everyday, commonplace sort of thing going on in a socialtech-integrated classroom all the time. No bells and whistles, just effective use of social media.

Drill Objective: Source Management

1. Tweet the most common topics in your Delicious list to the class #

2. Look through the # and find topics that are under-represented in your own library.

3. Seek out those resources on the Delicious lists of your classmates and add them to your own library. I'd like to see each of you add at least five resources with tags.

4. Choose one of the resources you hadn't known about and write a blog post describing it and explaining exactly why it is useful. Be sure you consider it a 5-star resource.

We'll share our findings in 15 minutes. Class captain, please copy all blog posts to the 'resource' section of the class wiki when we are finished.

Thanks.

That's it. And in fifteen minutes, the students have expanded their personal reference libraries, have collaborated with one another on resources, and have evaluated what makes a resource useful.

It's just a drill.

The Five Minute Twitter Verb Crunch Drill

This is the outline of a five minute verb crunch drill I've been using with my Latin I, II, and III students. You and your kids will need to be comfortable using Diigo, Twitter, & Twitterfall, but the payoff has been great. My students practically beg to do the exercise and across the board I've seen kids' understanding of verb parsing go way up -- to the point now that much of the fear has been taking out of sight-reading (which is something every foreign language teacher will understand is hugely necessary).

I'll keep it simple; here's the drill:

1. Students open a passage or poem by whatever author you are working on. In my Latin III class, for example, the kids are going to be translating Horace's Satire 1.9. So they open up the text and open a Tweet feed.

2. Next, I assign each student five lines. They are responsible for highlighting each verb in their selection using Diigo.

3. Once the highlighting is complete, the students parse each verb (for example, in Latin the verb 'laudo' is parsed: 1st person singular present active indicative of 'laudare' meaning 'to praise'). The individual parsed verbs are Tweeted to our class hashtag.

4. As the students are parsing, I am running a live Twitterfall of their hashtag on the wall via LCD projector.

5. When time is up, (I'd say give 'em roughly a minute and a half per verb), we check the verbs as a class. Goodies (homework passes, free Internet roaming minutes, etc.) are given out to folks who either nailed all of their verbs or who improved from the previous day.

6. As we work, we reTweet correct verb parsings back to the feed. If we find mistakes, we fix them and Tweet the corrected versions back to the feed.

7. Finally, the students cut-and-paste the correct version of all of the verbs to their online notebooks (we use Google Docs).

This all takes about five minutes. By the end, the students have practiced their parsing, seen good examples and corrected errors, and have created a study list of all of the verbs in the selection that can be used to assist in translation.

Furthermore, they completed the drill using integrated collaborative real-time methods; thus instilled in the learning of the course content is the practical skill-building work of learning how to best use a network. And because this drill is done on a semi-daily basis, it doesn't feel like a 'tech lesson'; it just feels natural.

And in the end, each student has a copy of the original annotations in Diigo as well as a copy of the completed and corrected Tweets in their notebooks.

I'm sure this type of drill can easily be modified for other disciplines -- from vocab words in English class to major event chronologies in Social Studies to terms in Biology or formulas in Math and Chemistry.