My multimedia reflection, a Twitter essay was based on the article Teaching in a Participatory Digital World by Michele Jacobsen and the video, The Influence of Participatory Culture on Education by Henry Jenkins where the takeover of the new world of digital technology and the Web 2.0 in education is discussed. The article and the video both have many supporting arguments as to why teachers and the education systems should use these new technologies to their benefit. Before reading this article, I thought that technology should be introduced into the classroom more and more with the upbringing of all of these digital platforms. Growing up with technology, I have seen the importance and benefits that the technology brings to learning habits. I personally have gotten the opportunity to incorporate technology into my education and hope that I can do the same for my students education in a way to benefit their learning. I think that it is important that teachers take this step forward to learn how to properly use all this technology for the benefit of the students. It may be a lot of work for the teachers to get started and it may be hard for them to put aside their old ways but it is the way society is going and we should keep up with it. I think that it is an important learning curve for the teachers to take, to benefit the students learning.
These platforms create participatory platforms that can benefit the classroom by enforcing higher order critical thinking through creative participation, focused conversation, innovative explorations and online simulations and experiments. These technologies can help develop deeper understanding and increased motivation with the students with active participation and different ways of learning. I know that some subjects may be hard to incorporate more of this inquiry based thinking through digital technologies, that is okay. I think it is okay to have a blend of both, the old-fashioned way of teaching and this new interactive style with digital technology. These digital technologies can also benefit the classroom with the reflection portion of leaning where online environments can easily be created for peer collaboration and individual reflection. Using the digital world to enhance teaching also allows the benefit of having these resources available to you, where teachers can strengthen their resources and students can support their learning with additional information. I disagreed with the article when they said that the access the students the web should be unfiltered. I don’t think that we will ever be able to trust the students enough to allow this. The students use Web 2.0 platforms for their own personal use as well, we should most definitely keep the web access to the students filtered to keep them focused on using the web for educational purposes.
For the most part, I can see the shift to using more digital technology to educate in schools where the teachers are starting to forget about their old ways and incorporate more interactive online technologies. I know when I was teaching in my second week of my practicum, I tried my best to incorporate online applications like Kahoot, Mentimeter and online research activities. I could rent out a cart of laptops so that all the students had the proper access to the web. I saw that the students were motivated to learn in these settings being interactive, thinking critically and even creating their own multimedia project. It was a fun and interactive way for them to learn the concepts, inquiring on their own.
Doing the multimedia reflection as a Twitter essay was a huge learning curve for me. As I do not normally use twitter, I struggled when trying to use the format to the best of its abilities. I tried to make each tweet involve some sort of GIF or a poll to make them a little bit more interesting than just the plain old text its self as a tweet. I also found it hard to keep my thoughts within the 280 characters even though they had just recently increased the character count from 140 characters. I feel like I may think too much to simplify my thoughts in one tweet. Another struggle I came across was just through the posting process. I kept posting a tweet and realizing that it wasn’t attached to the tweet before or I just simply forgot the hashtag that we needed. Over all, I think that the twitter essay is a great way to share thoughts and opinions, being something that I would consider using again. Access to my multimedia reflection on twitter is located here, as well as some snap shots of some of my tweets below.
