Thursday, October 4, 2018

Am I convincing my preservice teachers of the power of Twitter?


I am doing a study with Dr. Christopher Parrish from the University of South Alabama on the use of the #MTBoS community with preservice teachers.  So, I asked my students to get a Twitter account if they didn’t already have one and they have had a couple of assignments with Twitter.  The first one was to follow 10 math people on Twitter and share why they chose to follow them.  The second one was to observe a Twitter Chat.  I didn’t want to force them to participate in one as I felt it would be too intimidating.  However, I thought following along with one would expose them to what a Twitter chat was like, without the pressure of participation.

Throughout this semester, I have sensed the skepticism of my students of Twitter being helpful to them as a future teacher.  However, after they completed their reflections on the Twitter chat, I feel hopeful that they may actually see the potential of Twitter.  Here are some comments from their reflections that stood out to me:

I think it is unique, fun, and interesting that teachers from all over the country hop onto Twitter and chat together! I think that it would be fun to answer questions about this, but more fun to debate with people on why they answered the topic question. I like debating. Don’t get this mixed up with arguing. I like seeing different sides. I would consider myself an easy-going, open minded individual. I think that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and that is what I think the
beauty is in Twitter.

I love that the ED chat is based off of a hashtag so that I can look back at some of these teaching techniques after the chat is over and take notes on what I want to use in the future for my own classroom. Also, following along with an ED chat really opened my eyes to how useful twitter can be to me in my own classroom. We had so many chats to choose from for this assignment and it has helped me realize that I constantly can ask for help from the many math teachers in the world of Twitter.

I had no idea things like this existed; and I think they are such a beneficial way to learn about topics you might not know much about.  You can also see what opinions other teachers have out there.  Lastly, I think it is a great way to share resources one might have found and has found useful.  Twitter chats are really beneficial, and in the future I definitely would like to read more.

My first and biggest reflection was that I am completely overwhelmed by it. I did choose one of the more popular chats so I assume this would be subject to change based on the chat. My next emotion that comes to my mind is surprise. I was honestly surprised at the participation level across the nation. This brings me to my final emotion, happiness. Knowing that there are so many resources out there that are willing to be shared by so many is such a great resource for me as a future teacher.

But the best part of this week was that two of my students actually tweeted at me and included the class hashtag, #Math261. These tweets are below.



No comments:

Post a Comment