Post #6

One of my teacher's from high school, Mr. Dill, heavily believed in using Twitter as a form of communication. It allowed us to tweet at him and communicate with him even after school, and get more of an immediate response than through email. Using a class hashtag we could share our thoughts, comments, pictures, or anything else with him or the entire class. Many times he would require us to watch something such as a Presidential speech, and communicate our opinions about it through our class hashtag. It was also a great way for parents who had Twitters to stay involved with the class and see what assignments were being completed, and become aware of any upcoming projects in the class. It was an all around great medium of communication for the students, the parents, and the teacher.

I definitely think I will have a class Twitter when I become a teacher, because I think it is an easy and simple way to create communication inside and outside the classroom. While I don't think all apps/social sites are a good form of communication between teachers and students, I do think sites that allow class discussion and create easy forms of communication are great. If I do choose to use social sites as a from of communication in the classroom, I will definitely take into account my students' opinions of the site that they are using, because I can speak from personal experience that a lot of my teachers required us to use sites that were not fun and often had any problems.

A technology that I have been using a lot more recently is Blackboard, and during my senior year we had a program very similar to it called Canvas. I really love how these apps give us a way to submit our assignments, see our class calendar, and see any announcements our teacher has all in one place. A lot of schools do not use technology such as Blackboard/Canvas, and I think it makes it harder for the student to stay up to date on the assignments, and it limits communication between the teacher and the student. Coming from a student perspective, I can honestly say that having a program such as Blackboard is great because I love being able to submit all my assignments in the same place I check my grades, see my teachers' emails, and check the syllabus.