Twiducate – every student has a voice

This is not the first time I have blogged about Twiducate. I am doing this so the teachers who didn’t know about it on #aussieED can get a better idea of what it is. I have used it with my junior secondary classes for a number of years now. It provides an avenue for every student to have a voice. It also allows them , for my lessons, to practise their French or to give me feedback and ideas on an assignment. A classic use of it last year was when I was trying to do group assessment and it was the first time I had done it with my class. We wanted to get it right. We used Twiducate to feed in our ideas. I have worked with a French class in France with it. It was good because the French students were writing at night and when we came into class the next day their posts were there. Students like Twiducate. I can put the feed back or input up on my whiteboard and we can have a look at what they wrote and what we think or whether we have some errors to correct in French. It is a safe, reliable platform for feedback and literacy skills.It also makes a good precursor to blogging. My year 8s loved it last year and they would put up pictures with their text and share links with each other for assignments. Each class uses it slightly differently. As a teacher you are in control since you can delete undesirable comments. I have never had to do that. Twiducate brings out he best in students. I write a post with my questions or ideas or little task and away they go. They also love seeing their comments pop up on the board if I link it to my board. Twiducate has been invaluable in my classroom for ensuring everybody gets seen and heard. It’s a tool which creates equity.

Building engaged teams

This slide presentation is designed for the business environment but the core ideas apply equally well to education. You read through the presentation and it arrives at the part about disengagement and isn’t that the bane of every teacher and of schools? We are always talking about engagement and how to engage students. The presentation equally reminds us we need to engage the adults in the schools too. Morale and enthusiasm go a long way in any age group. Building engaged teams has a good look at how disengagement occurs and the sorts of strategies which can be used to re-engage people. What appealed to me as a teacher was that word – explore – we need to get students exploring and we need to be able to explore as teachers as well. Technology offers so many possibilities for exploration. It’s a seemingly bottomless pit. You only have to take iPads into a language classroom and get the students to use the Puppet Pals app and suddenly everyone is switched on and engaged in a very real way. Or you take students to Voki.com and they just love it, want to use it and will work hard to make it all happen. Had it not been for technology I would not have seen this presentation and one of the real values of belonging to a networking team like SlideShare is you become engaged by interacting with others from all over the world who have considerable expertise in their chosen fields of interest. That’s motivating and creates engagement. So I offer the presentation to you so you can have your own thoughts and discussions around engagement and how you make it happen.