Ah, start a campaign on twitter they said. It will be fun they said! Teach your students all about Ribble’s element of Digital Communication and selecting a medium for sharing a message they said! (Okay, no one said the last one).
I began this class with the idea that because I was a Connected Educator with my school division, and because I have a genuine interest and belief in the ability to use technology in education as an agent of innovation – that I would not have a hard time choosing a project.
Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with my choice of a project that I could create with my students. As I said in my last post I truly believe that students need the freedom to create and communicate on Social Media as a part of school in order to develop authentic digital citizenship skills. While I had loftier goals that just that – If all my students got out of this project is that Social Media can be used to communicate a sincere and positive message, then that’s okay with me.
It seems that a global pandemic, and 90 percent of the world’s children being “out” of school can take over twitter, and very quickly overtake a message of language learning in an online community setting.
I wont lie, we didn’t really establish that “community” I was hoping for. I didn’t get my own students to participate in the challenges they themselves designed for the last few weeks of the project, so I feel that even our classroom community was a little fractured.
But given the events of the world at the moment, that’s not really anything to mourn.
So – I have AGAIN adapted (apologies to Alec who has to grade me now, and decide what on earth this project now is).
Although I went ahead and posted the tweets every #MichifMonday, and continued to respond to the engagement on twitter, I also have begun uploading everything I used to teach this project to my students to a shared google file that I will link in my final project blog post. If I am unable to create a community on twitter as a social activism project, I can contribute to a professional learning network of teachers – which is also a community, right???
If you are interested check out my “Major Project Final Product” page and there you will find an overview of our project, the (always growing) shared vocabulary slides as well as a mini-unit regarding Metis culture and history with Seesaw linked activities to correspond, and all of the shared resources I used (and have permission to share publicly). If you know (or are) a teacher interested in using twitter to teach effective Digital Communication skills and learn something in a new language along the way share it with them (or keep it for later)!
Maybe we can build a community a little bit at a time.
Explorations in Edtech 