An article on Twitter for teachers, from Edudemic, a site that distributes stories around teaching, learning, and the impact of technology on education.
In addition to the comment that populated itself below, I want to add that this link contains a list of etiquette rules for Twitter that I think are very useful for a newbie.
Twitter has proven itself to be an indispensable tool for educators around the globe. Whatever skill level you may be, Twitter is downright fun and worth your time. So here's a useful guide that we curated from Edudemic's archives in an effort to put something together that was a bit easier to read than random blog posts.
Below is a great idea from a science teacher who posted this on an NSTA listserv. This is a creative idea to promote student learning of basic foundation knowledge in an introductory level course. This technique promotes "students interacting, thinking, creating, communicating, and applying content/subject knowledge"!
The particular workshop recording that interests me is the one on using peer review options for online teaching. This is something I'm trying to incorporate more of, and it was helpful to hear about how other teachers incorporate it into their courses!
Poll Everywhere is the easiest way to gather live responses in any venue... conferences, concerts, classrooms, and company off-sites - anywhere with internet. We've been working to end 'death by PowerPoint' and raise the bar on presenting since 2008. More than 4,000 schools and 100,000 teachers poll with Poll Everywhere.
I have used this in my classes and love it!
The free Poll Everywhere mobile app is perfect for responding to polls, presenting polls, and clicking through PowerPoint presentations. Use it to...
1.) Respond to polls: Audience members can use the app to respond to the presenter's questions live.
2.) Poll an audience: Presenters can ask the audience questions and display poll responses live.
3.) Navigate in Powerpoint: Presenters can control the flow of Powerpoint presentations using a smartphone as a wireless remote.
Participants
Audience members or students can easily respond to polls or vote using the app on a smartphone or tablet. Aside from the app, they can respond via web browser, text message, or Twitter.
Presenters
Professors, teachers and presenters can create and display questions on the fly, including Q&A and multiple choice polls. Questions can be presented directly from the web or embedded in a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. Audience responses are displayed in real-time. Great for classroom participation, or gathering opinions from the audience.
PowerPoint Remote
Presenters using PowerPoint can use the Poll Everywhere mobile app as a presentation clicker, to navigate through your PowerPoint presentation with ease. It has a slick, streamlined design and a set of polling controls built-in.
Key Features:
* Create or answer multiple choice, true/false, open ended, ranking poll, and clickable image questions.
* Participants are automatically shown the presenter's current question, for quick and easy participation.
* Watch results update live.
* Click through a PowerPoint presentation with the included Presenter Remote feature.
What a great way to be able to asynchronously poll students and still allow them to remain anonymous. This also gives students to see how well their knowledge compares to other students. It also allows them to see if their way of thinking is similar to other students.
Performance assessment, also known as alternative or authentic assessment, is a form of testing that requires students to perform a task rather than select an answer from a ready-made list. For example, a student may be asked to explain historical events, generate scientific hypotheses, solve math problems, converse in a foreign language, or conduct research on an assigned topic. Experienced raters--either teachers or other trained staff--then judge the quality of the student's work based on an agreed-upon set of criteria. This new form of assessment is most widely used to directly assess writing ability based on text produced by students under test instructions
How timely! The NY Times is seeking input from educators on how smartphones have added or detracted from their classrooms in an occasional special report series called "Learning". While it's for high schools, I'm certain that community college faculty could share input.
This activity blends just the right amount of instruction, guidance and interactivity to teach some concepts of quadratic equations. Specifically it reinforces the concepts of the axis of symmetry and the vertex.