Ive been looking into several different project ideas, but have become frustrated at the barriers to delivering them. I initially enquired with our technician into enabling social media platforms such as twitter, but was told it would not be possible to enable social platforms, due to our network being RM and using dynamic IP's. Fortunately since then I have found that I have access to twitter.
The first area I am going to look into is game play in the classroom. I see that some teachers are using Minecraft, to be different I'm going to try survival craft. During the process of learning the game I hope that I can set learners up using a Wiki, so we can co construct knowledge, share game strategies and become familiar with game objects, objectives and vocabulary. I intend to follow up with a series of learner blog posts, outlining what they have done, what they feel they have learned from it and including some creative and extended writing activities. I'm also interested in teaching actual use of social media, and so far have access to twitter on my computer. I intend to get learners to tweet about their Survival craft experiences, and hopefully working with another teacher - set up a twitter chat where learners from two classes can talk to one another. This will then lead nicely into some work on digital citizenship.
Roadmap - alpha
Contact developer of Survival Craft and ascertain if possible to play Survival craft online, or have installed on network for educational use - Free of charge
Draft letters to parents seeking permission for children to create Twitter Accounts for lesson use
Ben, thanks for sharing this - some nice ideas! A quick word on age groups. If you are encouraging pupils to use Twitter, it will be a good idea to go through the following link:
ReplyDeletehttps://support.twitter.com/articles/470968-families and design a lesson for your
pupils discussing good net-etiquette as well as privacy so that they are aware of their 'voice' online. Also as Twitter is made up of lots of diverse communities of people, they need to be aware of not sharing 'personal information' like mobile numbers, locations etc- particularly if they are young. This is all part of developing their digital citizenship - an important issue to address with pupils before they use these platforms. As mentioned during our forst 3 days, in the US , because of the COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), many social platforms ask for a minimum age of 13. As far as I can tell Twitter doesn't appear to ask for a minimum age for members. However, my suggestion would be that they are at least 13 if you want to get them to use Twitter as part of your lesson. I will post this as a post as well to make sure everyone sees it.