Integrating slack, a synchronous or asynchronous chat tool, into the higher ed classroom

How one professor and students use twitter to drive class discussion participation

I'm glad you like it - I was fascinated too, Jim. I really expected to not love Twitter in the classroom, but I've been rethinking it since I saw this.

@chreych I am always curious about this. Since twitter is free, if they do not have an account - can't we ask them to create one for use in the classroom?

Students hate discussion boards and mostly feel like they don't get anything out of them. They go into check box mode and real dialogue is lost. How can we fix them?

Glad you all got some use from it. It's a sensationalistic title, but it's something I thought about often as a student. We don't discuss in discussion boards - we write polite, well cited essays and respond to other essays. I'm definitely in favor of rethinking how we do student engagement - discussion boards really could be wonderful, but in most of my experiences as a student they were really lack luster. As an instructor, I'm not sure mine are really much better! I keep tinkering trying to do better.