I had such a great experience doing this blog I hope that all of you that read this have learned as much as I did. I realize the true power of web 2.0 in the classroom, and how to utilize Twitter to increase student comprehension.I know that it will be a struggle to incorporate these things into my classroom next year but I hope that I am up for the challenge.

FINAL PROJECT BOOYAH!!!

Incase you wanted to see here is my final project.

Cassidy Peterson Final Project

Lesson Plan and Outline
Title of the Activity - Isn't learning Tweet
Concept / Topic for your Learners - Communication through online resources / introduction to the 4 states of matter
General Goal(s) Specific Learning Outcomes - learn how to use twitter to communicate with classmates and learn what the 4 states of matter are and how they are each unique.
Characteristics of your Learners - For this project I am using students that my wife tutors at the nearby by elementary school. There are 2 boys and 2 girls. They are going into 7th grade so they are a little younger than the students I will be teaching in my classroom. For the most part these students are interested, willing to work, motivated, but for some reason are lacking math or reading skills (hence why they are tutored over the summer). The students that I will teach in 7th grade will be very similar but there is no guarantee due to the public school systems. This will be the first time these students a formally taught about the states of matter or how to tweet. The great thing about these students is they are motivated and want to do better. I will use this to help me. One student does very well in all subjects except math, while the other 3 need help in reading.
Required Materials, including Web 2.0 - internet, WS, textbook (not needed but a good resource), computer, smartphone or phone with twitter, pen, twitter account, and parent consent.
Introduction to the Activity Step-By-Step Procedures (This should be very specific steps!) – This would be what I am doing if I was to teach this in class, my steps changed a little due to time restraints.
1) Show a clip of the Ellen DeGeneres show on her segment about the tweets of the day (funny ones).
2) Ask students if they know what tweets are.
3) Discuss what twitter is going into great detail If needed.
4) Show students my twitter account and discuss that everyone can see this, it is on the internet.
5) Have discussion about what is OK for Mr. Peterson to say on my account and what is not.
6) Make first class tweet, showing students how to type and what #s mean.
7) Ask them if this looks cool.
8) Explain how they will need parent signature to do this and show them the permission slip.
9) Have students fill out and get parent signatures that night.
10) The next day have students create twitter accounts and follow each other.
11) Send first class tweet.
12) Ask them wouldn't it be cool I'd we could use this to learn?
13) Explain how they will be using only twitter to fill out a WS and each person will have a different part to complete, and then they will have to communicate with each other about the part they researched over twitter.
14) Model how to do this using the first section.
15) Students will complete the WS using twitter, and complete the Venn diagram on their own.
16) I will follow all of them to make sure this is being done.
17) Students turn in WS to have it checked for completion.
18) I will look over WS and possibly a clicker quiz if time allows.
19) One on one discussion with each student will be done to evaluate the effects of twitter; also score on the WS will be kept to look for student learning.
Assessment - I will check the WS for completion and percentage correct by all 4 students. Also I will talk to each student about their thoughts on tweeting for HW completion.
Conclusion - Based on the percentage correct of the WS I will make a conclusion on the effectiveness of tweeting for collaboration.
Other items as needed, depending on your situation, for example:
     Adaptations (For Students With Learning Disabilities) - I can have students with handicaps have their parents tweet or they can just tell me and I will tweet for them.
     Extensions (For Gifted Students) - These students can include pictures with their tweets or I will make a premier WS for them to do and they can work as a group on it.
     Possible Connections To Other Subjects - With this WS it is pretty much only science, but if we used tweeting with our bridge project we could add social studies for architecture, math for calculations, language arts for procedure, and science with actually building.
Final Report

            In the 21^st century there have been many social networking tools that have shaped our world into what it is today; Facebook, YouTube, my space, and twitter are just some of those tools. The question for educators is: How can I use this in my classroom to enhance student learning? While that seems like an easy enough question, it is not as easy as it seems. There are privacy laws to worry about, parent assumptions about social networking, “old school” teacher and administrators to worry about, and students’ ability to use something that is normally used for socializing for an educational purpose. All of the consequences in mind as an educator I still have the responsibility to prepare my students for the 21^st century by using tools they would normally use in their everyday life.

For my final project I chose to use twitter as a communication piece to enhance student conversation. I chose to use twitter because of the nature of the activity my students would be doing. They would simply be researching a topic and relaying the information they found to the other students in class. What better way than having them follow each other on twitter and learn from the tweets? Instead of all of the students sitting in a classroom and listening to each other one at a time, I could have them tweet each other and they could follow along while communicating via twitter. This would incorporate communication, technology literacy, researching skills, and 21^st century skills all in one simple task. I found some students that were eager to move forward with my experiment and I got to work.

Before the experiment began I was very excited but nervous at the same time. I had such a great experience communicating via twitter while working on my group project in IDT 516, how could the students not have the same experience I had? Then I started to think about all the pitfalls, what if the parents were not on board, what if the students didn’t have twitter, what if they didn’t do it, what if they did a bad job, or what if it didn’t work? I decided to be as prepared as possible. I made parent signature slips, came up with what I would explain to each student, made lesson plans, WS, example tweets that were OK, and thought about what account names we should make. That way I could be as prepared as possible. As I quickly learned, you can never be too prepared.

The students that I had chosen to help me out were students that my wife was tutoring (summer time so my choices were limited). There are 2 boys and 2 girls. They are going into 7th grade so they are a little younger than the students I will be teaching in my classroom. For the most part these students are interested, willing to work, motivated, but for some reason are lacking math or reading skills (hence why they are tutored over the summer). The students that I will teach in 7th grade will be very similar but there is no guarantee due to the public school systems. This will be the first time these students a formally taught about the states of matter or how to tweet. The great thing about these students is they are motivated and want to do better. I will use this to help me. One student does very well in all subjects except math, while the other 3 need help in reading. My wife helped me out by contacting their parents the night before asking them for their participation and they all agreed, when they told it was for a masters project and that I would be monitoring the whole thing. One thing that one parent asked for was that there would be no pictures of her son, and that after the project his twitter account be disable. I agreed and told all other parents that this would be the case. The following is a lesson plan/procedure of what I did to teach the students what to do on the first day that we met.

1) Show a clip of the Ellen DeGeneres show on her segment about the tweets of the day (funny ones).

2) Ask students if they know what tweets are.

3) Discuss what twitter is going into great detail If needed.

4) Show students my twitter account and discuss that everyone can see this, it is on the internet.

5) Have discussion about what is OK for Mr. Peterson to say on my account and what is not.

6) Make first class tweet, showing students how to type and what #s mean.

7) Ask them if this looks cool.

8) Explain how they will need parent signature to do this and show them the permission slip (Since my wife contacted the parents the night before I had already done this step).

9) Have students fill out and get parent signatures that night (Since my wife contacted the parents the night before I had already done this step).

10) Students create twitter accounts and follow each other.

11) Send first class tweet.

12) Ask them wouldn't it be cool I'd we could use this to learn?

13) Explain how they will be using only twitter to fill out a WS and each person will have a different part to complete, and then they will have to communicate with each other about the part they researched over twitter.

14) Model how to do this using the first section.

15) Students research their topic, and show their WS before getting phones back.

16) Students will complete the WS using twitter, and complete the Venn diagram on their own. This will be worked on for the remainder of class and at home if needed.

17) I will follow all of them to make sure this is being done.

            During the first day things went very well and the students responded well to the idea of using twitter to learn. Three out of the four had never used twitter before so they were excited to use something new. I was very lucky that each student had smartphones and had downloaded the twitter app in excitement for using it in “tutoring” the next day. We sped through the introductory part, and they all laughed at the Ellen clip that I had used. The part that took the longest was the setting up of accounts. The students all wanted usernames that were taken and could not decide on other usernames, finally I decided to use first name, last name, and then pvjh1. After that happened we were off, kind of. The students wanted to add pictures and play with their account, I told them they could do that tomorrow if there was time (knowing that there would not be and that we would be deleting their account). We went through how to find each other, how to follow each other, and the first tweet. The students were excited to receive their first tweet and caught on relatively fast, which might have been since we were in such a small group. When I explain the activity they all seemed eager to try it and did not really listen to what I had to say. We completed the modeling of the first section, but I had to not allow them to touch their phones unless they are turning the screen back on. When I sent them into different rooms to research their part they started to tweet each other, and were not working. I had to take the phones away and have them complete their research and get it checked off before they could get their phone back. After that they started to tweet each other the answers but they all tweeted at once making it impossible to follow the order of the WS. I tweeted for them all to come back to the room, and one student did not come back because she was too busy tweeting and did not read the tweet. I went to get her and explain to all of them that they needed to take turns, so I gave them an order to share in and they went back to work. Finally, the tweets had started flowing but the problem was all they were doing was sending each other the answer. It was interesting to see them explain pictures, but one student discovered you could tweet pics so he sent the pictures of his WS for anything that had to be drawn. Our time had come to an end so I sent them home to finish even though there was not that much to do. When their parents picked them up I could hear them explaining to their parents what they were doing and how “cool” it was. I went home excited to see what would happen the next day.    
The following is what was done the second day I met with the students.

18) Students turn in WS to have it checked for completion.

19) I will look over WS

20) One on one discussion with each student will be done to evaluate the effects of twitter; also score on the WS will be kept to look for student learning.

When the students showed up for the second day I was pleased to see that each student had completed the WS, and that they all had basically the same thing. The only major difference was in the Venn diagrams which is good, because those were supposed to be done individually. Each student received at least a 90% and the only difference came is the Venn diagrams. When I interviewed the students they all had positive things to say about the experience and even said that they wished their teachers would do it. When they said that I started to think about how the administration would be with using twitter and I think that this experiment will help me have them unblock twitter. I would have to agree with the students and I think this was a positive experience but I think twitter would be better used for collaborating and not teaching. It is difficult to teach someone something in 140 characters or less.

Great Experience

I met with the students and I can say it was truly great experience. The students loved the idea of sharing ideas of twitter and felt that they learned a lot. I questioned the amount of learning happening but each student was able to complete the Venn Diagrams on their own.  In the future I will use a quiz as an assessment but due to time restraints I could not. All and all I think the project was a success and I hope to use this next year.

Great Job kiddos

I had a great experience working with my kids yesterday. Yesterday we were able to sign up for accounts, begin the experience, trouble shoot, and the students started on the WS, completed the WS while in different rooms. At first the students struggled with the method of how to converse over twitter. They tried to all talk at once and got lost in the conversation. I stepped in  and suggested that they take turns on tweeting to each other. They did, and started to really share. The one thing I noticed was they were pretty much just sharing the answers over twitter. I worried about how well they would understand the material, and look forward to finding out. Yesterday when they left they had about 3/4 the WS done and should finish shortly after that. I am excited to see how they did, and to talk to each of them about the experience. They should be coming in shortly so I will check in after our conversation.  

Had a great experience working with my kids today. Definitely going to set up accounts for my students or have rules to what their names should be. My 4 students had crazy ideas about what a username should be. Eventually we went with first name and last name then pvjh1 so they could find eachother easier. They worked very well, but they are working on the WS right now we will have to see how they do.

Students on Board

Last night my wife talked to all of her children that she tutors and asked them to help me with my project, the students and their parents all agreed so I will meet with them later today and teach my lesson. YEAH!

Through the process of my final group project I frll in love with communicating throigh twitter to accomplish a task. I believe this will really benefit my 7th grade science students so this is what I would like to incorporate in my final project. I will present a worksheet to be researched to a group of studnets and have them communicate and fill out the worksheet only through twitter. I hope this will inspire creativity, motivation, and make the results of ths WS better. If this is the case I will work on setting this up in my own classroom for a group project on something more difficult than a WS.