Erin, I completely agree with you. When I leave school I don’t want to
think about it at all. My wife isn’t happy when I have to deal with school
at home. It’s not fair to her. As far as Twitter is concerned, if I were
to allow students to use their cell phones in class for asking questions
through twitter it would probably work for many of the students and possibly
get some of the shy ones to participate. But I can see in some of my
classes (I don’t just teach Physics) many students would be participating in
something other than my class (texting friends for example). This might be
a negative critique of how interesting my class is, but I can honestly say I
would actually understand if students were to do that if I allowed cell
phones. In my opinion who’s talking trash about who (a hypothetical dispute
between students) in some other class is more interesting than science
sometimes. I’m thinking that if one were to use cell phones and Twitter for
question/answer sessions in class it could be limited to specific lengths of
time during class. For example after lectures students may find it useful
to have a short three minute window during which cell phone use was allowed
to ask questions. If the time limit were limited the students would have
less of an opportunity to stray from the question/answer session.
Message: 4
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:28:47 -0600
From: Erin Funk <esf5v@virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: [Phys-l] Social networking for educational use
To: phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
Message-ID:
<AANLkTiktscGinu8t+HQCkFUZej2knvzExV5GsRx7rK+g@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
I have not used social networking for my classes, however there are several
teachers in my school that do. One of them is a chemistry teacher. She
doesn?t have the students get on Facebook during class, as that would
defiantly be distracting. However, her students can friend her and she will
post reminders about tests, quizzes or other things she feels important and
I believe the students post questions to the Facebook page when they need
help. Because the students are on Facebook all the time they receive the
reminders regularly. It seems to work well for her. I am not opposed to
this method. My issue is two-fold. First of all, I feel that at some point
my students need to be responsible for their own learning and therefore I
don?t want to hold their hand and remind them every night when they have a
test or quiz after I have already told them in class. Secondly, and maybe
this isn?t the correct mindset, but when I leave work (after I have stayed
for tutorials) I don?t want to check my Facebook page to see if any students
have any questions regarding my class. Once I get home with my family, I?m
finished with work. I find these few hours every evening to decompress very
valuable to my sanity as an educator and to feel like I have to continually
be available to my students is a bit over the top for me.
Another teacher in the math department uses twitter in her classroom.
Apparently
the students sign up to follow her and then during lecture they can tweet
questions which appear on the board and she can address them. Last I
checked they were still trying to work out some bugs for this and I?m not
really sure how this approach is working.