Summer session has started and my Instructional Applications of the Internet has kicked off. As a part of the class we will be blogging a couple of times a week, using twitter, doing podcasts and other various internet-y things. I’m always trepidatious when I sign up for classes in which I am the outsider, the class is focused on educators. I’m not an educator by trade but have found a lot of use out of the classes that I have taken from ITEC for my day job in enterprise architecture.
I’ve already signed up for a blog (obviously), have my twitter handle established for the class (I chose not to cross the streams between my class handle and personal handle), and have set out to do some research on WebQuests.
I’ve been a big fan of twitter for some time. It started out for me as a way to keep with friends and coworkers without having to burn down my SMS allocation. We’d use it at work to comment on projects and keep up with what everyone else was doing outside of work. It’s quickly taken on a whole new meaning as I’ve started to follow various companies that we’ve implemented at work. I can follow their product and am quickly notified of security bugs, when new patches are out,etc. I also follow a number of accounts that keep my notified of things like traffic, weather forecasts, and sports updates.
Twitter is a great tool that allows you broadcast anything and allows those that want to subscribe to keep up to date. I think some of this could lend itself towards classroom / school use cases. For instance if we take my cases about following companies for updates, teachers can utilize this if they need to get updated information out to the student base outside of the classroom setting. Did a teacher give you the wrong page numbers in class, no problem, blast out some tweets that gives the updated page numbers. Do students have questions on assignments, they could ask them via twitter to the entire student base or to the teachers themselves, easy crowd sourcing that could free up teachers’ time.
My next task is to figure out what these WebQuest things are, determine what I want mine to be, and write up a proposal. Onward and upward.
kentstateinstructionalapps 
Chris, I like the idea of quick and easy course corrections or content questions that all the students could see. I think that with Twitter a teen might actually stop to ask a question via Twitter instead of just letting the teachable moment slip away and be forgotten. Thanks for expanding my ideas about what Twitter can do in the education field.
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It is a very interesting perspective that I seem to be the outsider among a group of educators. Thankfully I do have a little bit of background as my wife is a teacher and can vet a lot of my technology ramblings with her to see if they are good ideas or not. I’d like to think that a fresh set of eyes from someone (me) adds a little different perspective than the general consensus.
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