Yet for all this apparent tech savvy, it’s taken me a good two years to realise that web 2.0 is more than candy-striped buttons and bizarrely-named websites. I feel like the kid proudly waving his eight-track tape player in the face of fully iPodded youths. I’m 24, for God’s sake… I don’t know why it took me so long to catch on.

It’s not like I don’t keep up with the Joneses… I own an iPod Touch, have a six-digit ICQ number from back in the day, and managed to bag “j.greenwood” early on in Gmail’s beta, before at least half a dozen other people who seem unable to cope with the loss and have their email sent there anyway. The next time a plane ticket arrives I’m using the bloody thing, whether it says Jacqueline Greenwood or not.

I suppose I’m so used to having messages of “omg! try this it sooooo roxxorz” or “hello friend, try new Floosh, the lavatory cleaner that also freshens breath” that I filter out anything that isn’t a recommendation from a friend as… well, spam. Seeing the little buttons at the bottom of websites, hearing teachers talk about it at school – even seeing it on the news – it didn’t quite register.

Twitter was just another of those words I smirked at the first dozen times I heard it spoken aloud. Much like e-assessment site Yacapaca, Mahara, or hell, even Google.

I’m still not sure whether I’d want to change the way I use Twitter now by extending it into my classroom; having students follow my personal account doesn’t exactly appeal, though I can see the benefits on a short-term basis (project work, etc), and have already set up a separate account I’ll use for teaching.

I’m also wary that there’s still a lot of hype that surrounds web 2.0 – this has died down over the last year or so, but there are still people who believe that web 2.0 offers “solutions” to “the education problem”. In reply to my mini-profile “ICT teacher up North, hopping on the Web 2.0 train a little too late. Blaming leaves on the track.” @jonesc_nc said:

As a new Twit and blogger, I’m sure there are many people who think I’m buying into the web 2.0 hysteria I’ve made a point of avoiding, but I think it’s shortsighted to avoid using tools that have a positive impact on your job because they might seem gimmicky.

So to close, I’d love to hear from anyone who has successfully used Twitter in their classroom, or anyone with a Who eight-track… the Pistols are getting old.

No related posts.

I’m very fortunate to work in a school where new technologies are embraced, and that we have a core group of people from different backgrounds, teaching different subjects, eager to share ideas. Compared to many schools, we have regular informal meetings where we would try to collaborate on some activity or other.

Working on things like this – a project, a club, a link between departments – offers the opportunity to expand your field of vision beyond the limitations of your subject as well as giving the opportunity to reflect on your own teaching, but as with so many things in teaching the biggest obstacle is time.

Inter-departmental projects are often rewarding, but finding the time to put one together can be far more difficult than it would seem at first glance. Recently, our leaders of learning (lol) and senior leadership team (sadly there’s no way to turn that into rofl) decided there should be themed homework projects across departments for next year’s year 7 cohort. Topics included “who am I?”, plots and protests, the world about us, etc – nothing too restrictive, yet some kind of over arcing theme.

I took on plots and protests, deciding to make a project based on cryptography. I started with some historical information about the Babington plot to oust Elizabeth I by using coded messages shuttled back and forth between Anthony Babington & the prison where Mary, Queen of Scots was being held in the cork of a beer barrel for some good historical background. I then moved on to introduce simple substitution (Caesar) cyphers using the excellent Cryptoclub website, and ended with a choice of research questions:

• Describe how important encryption of information is on the Internet, or
• Describe how complex the maths behind cryptography can get once you apply the power of computers.

Lovely. I sat back and marveled at what had turned out to be four hours of (thoroughly interesting) work to put together one-and-a-quarter-A4-pages-that-I-knew-I’d-be-told-to-cut-down-to-one-page-but-didn’t-have-a-clue-how.

Then I remembered… it was for year 7s. Alright, I wasn’t asking for them to crack 128-bit encryption, I was asking for an explanation of why the process was difficult, but yeah… kind of silly, really.

Back to the point of this post, taking me out of my comfort zone of spreadsheets, databases and Photoshoppery, I put on a history teacher’s deerstalker for an afternoon and learnt a hell of a lot. Several web-based resources made that process much easier; the excellent resources section of the Bletchley Park website, the Cryptoclub website mentioned earlier, Simon Singh’s Cracking Code Book, and – most importantly – a handful of people on Twitter, including the head of Humanities at my own school.

Good advice, and a couple of hours later, I had my homework project complete, ready for the little cherubs come January. The point I’m trying (a little too hard, maybe) to make is that the biggest part of CPD is reflection. Through something as simple as planning a homework activity a little outside my comfort zone, with the help of other teachers, I spent an afternoon doing little else.

While I’m not sure exactly whether, or how, I’d integrate Twitter into my classroom in a major way, the potential for sharing good practice and getting help from a large and still growing community of professionals worldwide is huge. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, do.

“So why aren’t you saying this there, you wordy bastard?” you ask… well, I’m on 653 words so far. Try get that into 140 characters, I dare you.

Related posts:

1. Why so slow, Joe?
2. Housekeeping, subscribing & collaborating