Technology and Education

     I don't know if there are many things that teachers agree on about technology and the use of it in the classroom, but there is one idea that they do agree on: technology is always changing and at quite a rapid pace.  I know that there is a spectrum for teachers and technology use in the classrooms.  On one end there are the teachers that find it to be the best thing since sliced bread for their classrooms.  On the other end of the spectrum are teachers that are annoyed by it and think it is a distraction from the "real learning" that needs to take place.  In the middle of this spectrum is where I believe many teachers lie; these teachers see the benefits and downfalls of technology and thus do not reside at one extreme or the other.  Wherever teachers lie on the spectrum, it does need to be acknowledged that technology is not going away, and it is an important part of most students lives.

     Knowing that technology is an important part of students lives leads many teachers to the belief that it should be incorporated in some way into their teaching environments.  There are many small scale and large scale ways to incorporate technology, but I was particularly impressed by an article I recently read called, "The Twitter Essay" by Jesse Stommel.  This article discussed the use of Twitter in the classroom as a learning tool, in particular, to write essays.  This idea had never occurred to me. Yes, I have used Twitter in my college classes before, but only as a way to post out thoughts on something that was discussed or that happened in class.  I never thought about a Twitter essay before because really who can write an essay in a mere 140 characters?  The article made a great point though that it is about being concise with your words, which is an important skill to have.  As someone that is constantly told that I am too wordy, this is something that I struggle with on my own Twitter posts.  I have found that for posts that I am passionate about, I know what I want to say and it will take me several revisions before I accomplish that on Twitter with the characters allowed.  It really makes me focus on what I deem to be the important words and parts of the message that I am trying to convey.

     I think that this aspect of being concise with your words is probably one of the best ways that Twitter can be used in the classroom.  I learn a lot about different theorists that have laid the groundwork in education and I know that I would struggle to tweet out what each theorist's major contributions are in 140 characters.  Yet, this task would give me a chance to really hone in on what I believe are the MOST important contributions and why I think that they are the most important.  That work is a critical analysis, and that is the work we want our students to become engaged within our classes.  Dismissing these opportunities to engage our students with technology that they use on a daily basis is a misstep for educators.  We need to become creative like Stommel and figure out how to make the student's everyday technology work for our purposes.