Preparing Future Faculty - Technology in the classroom

Today, Kitty and I attended a great workshop through the Preparing Future Faculty Program.  It included three presentations on using technology and social media in our teaching.  I wanted to share some of the things we learned.  They're planning on posting a video of the workshop soon, so I'll link to that once it's available.

Here are the websites we explored during the session:

Twitter
Facebook
Delicious
StumbleUpon
Digg
VoiceThread
Google Sites
Association for Social Media & Higher Education
Higher Ed Twibe

Being a bit of a social media geek, I was excited to learn about new ways to use Facebook and Twitter with students.  With Facebook, you can create a group for your class and post updates or share links and articles you find.  It's a great way to keep the sense of community in the class going even outside of the classroom.

Twitter provides a lot of possibilities for learning.  I've always enjoyed using Twitter for  my own professional development (I follow other ESL teachers, educational technology enthusiasts, and people who work in higher ed.  It's a great way to network and learn from others). For students, Twitter can be wonderful because they can tweet about what they're learning in class and share links to articles or websites they've found.  They can follow accounts on Twitter based on a topic you assign them, and this becomes another way to do research and to learn more about a particular topic.  There are tons of people on Twitter who post daily grammar lessons, idioms, ESL podcasts, etc.  If our students joined Twitter, they'd find a wealth of English learning resources.  You should join Twitter too and follow me: @greenae

Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg are all social bookmarking sites.  You can save links to interesting sites you find and then share your links with your students.  These sites are great for supplementing what you've taught in the classroom.

VoiceThread is a site I'm really excited about, and I hope to use it soon with my students.  You can create videos online (which can be posted on your class website, if you have one), and your students can leave audio responses to your video.  What a great way to give speaking/listening homework!  Students listen to your lecture, then respond orally online.  This site is extremely popular for people teaching online courses, but I think it's also a great way to get our students to keep speaking English outside of class.

Google Sites is an easy way to create your own website. One of the presenters today created a Google Site just for her presentation.  It was great - instead of using PowerPoint (which gets boring after a while), she created a website that we can now all visit as many times as we want.  I've used Google Sites before, and it's incredibly easy to set up a website, even if you're completely tech-phobic.

Finally, the Association for Social Media and Higher Education and Higher Ed Twibe are great organizations dedicated to using social media and Web 2.0 tools in the classroom.  If you're on Twitter, you can join the Twibe (get it? cute, huh?)

Wonderful presentations today!  I learned so much from them, and I can't wait to try some of these ideas out in my classroom next session.  Let me know if you have any questions because this is the stuff I love talking about!