Students on Twitter (5 September- my first collaboration with teachers and students on twitter)
This year my Professional Inquiry Plan was to 'make educationally powerful connections'. In my mind the connections I wanted to make were with parents, mentors from industry and Universities, other schools. However, everything changed when I started following tweets during my July term break and I embarked on a journey that linked with my professional inquiry on Twitter just by chance. I connected with amazing intelligent and talented PLN from all around the World and before I knew it I was growing by leaps and bounds professionally and personally.
I tweeted a few educators (non subject specific) who were part of my PLN to see if anyone would be keen to colloborate. At that point I did not know how this would happen and what it would look like, The questions that came to mind were- would this be purposeful or relevant, would this be helpful to my students and their learning? What impact might this have on my students. Would there be constraints or will I just put it in the 'too hard' basket?
Jon Mullen and I discussed this further (as we were both new to Twitter) and we set up a date and time for my Yr.13 food technology students to speak with Jon's Yr.12 design students. You might wonder what might food technology students possibily be learning from speaking with design students?
This year I wanted my food technology students to think outside the box with their Culinology and Be Heston projects. I wanted them to reserach Heston Blumenthal's philosophy of stimulating the senses and changing perceptions in creating food products. The students were also doing an external standard where they needed to critique technological outcome’s design. I started thinking about how #SM could be used to form educationally powerful links and what a 21st Century classroom should look like? It resulted in me exploring beyond the cross curricular links my students had with Science, Digital Technology, product design at my school and forming crosscurricular links with other schools in New Zealand and Singapore. I wanted this link to be between educators and students' not just on the basis of subject specific knowledge but context based knowledge. A global overview and ability to be open about others opinions and views with regards to the topic were the main focus. The students went into the tweet session apprehensive and reluctant with 'But why??" and after the first 5 minutes into they the purpose and value of the exercise became quite obvious. For full discussion on "What is good design?"check out #diosobedient on Twitter or my blog post ' Students on Twitter'
Start the revolution!