A new semester brings a new beginning for my French11/12 class. With lots of excitement and enthusiasm, we began using Twitter and started a class blog. Maybe I’m integrating too much too quickly, but I thought both these forums would offer different perspectives and learning experiences. On the first day, I was almost giddy introducing the concepts of tweeting and blogging with my class. I have had most of these students since grade 8; it’s been four years together, and therefore, it was rejuvenating to have something new to offer them.
I first introduced Twitter and told them I would be tweeting out a question en français each day through our hashtag #phssF. I believe this provides a venue to respond to authentic questions in the target language. Instantly, the two class members who already use Twitter, tweeted back to Quel temps fait-il? It seems that they are enthusiastic about using their own devices in class. As for the rest of the class, it took me the better part of two classes to get them all registered on Twitter and Hootsuite. I introduced the benefits of using an organizer such as Hootsuite for organizing tweets. None of my students had heard about this before. By the end of the week, most students felt comfortable navigating Twitter and Hootsuite and using their French online.
Two glitches along this new pathway to integrating digital tools in my class included: one student who doesn’t not want to use social media; so I told him, he could write a handwritten response to each one of my tweeted questions. Another student had a photo of herself on a long board in a bikini. So the very next day, I mentioned to her that I was uncomfortable uploading our tweets with this picture on the class Smart Board. I offered that she could keep the picture for her personal tweeting and that perhaps she could start a new twitter identity more conducive to our French classroom. She had no issue and said she would just change her photo to one that’s more appropriate. This all leads me to the importance of discussing our purposes and responsibilities when using educational technology tools. Before, I even posted my first question to the class, I went over an online ethics letter, to be signed by the students and parents, and I also stressed that all communications via these digital tools should be for educational purposes only.
A link to my online ethics letter:
Thanks to a BCATML workshop I attended where @t_tsai shared her successes with Twitter in her Mandarin classes and her template for an online ethics letter for students, I felt confident in starting this new endeavor with my class.
Blogging on www. kidblog.org
The second item, I introduced was our blog. The main purpose here is to have a blog exchange with Madame Duckworth‘s class in Ontario. This will be ongoing. So far my class posted, collaboratively, their self-introductions. We also commented on over half of her students’ blog posts. We will comment on the rest this coming week. Because I am starting with a lot of scaffolding in the beginning, it is taking more time than I anticipated. The benefit, so far, that I can see from blogging is the accountability each student feels. They want to present polished French sentences. This leads to a lot of questions that I immediately respond to on the board, allowing immediate feedback, opposed to traditional work being handed in for correction.
All in all, it was a fun filled and inspiring week.