The takeaway...

There have been so many new and exciting things I have learned in the Online and Blended Learning course. I had already taught a two-way course and done the planning for teaching an online course, but the tools I have found through this course and the ideas on how to use them will help me to improve my face-to-face courses.

I have in the past created technology-based activities for my students, especially in the French courses I teach. I have been teaching French for many more years than I have been teaching English, so I have been looking for activities and ideas much longer for French. I have learned from experience and had the idea reinforced in this course that just because it involves technology, it does not make it better or more interesting (for the teacher or the student). I confess to spending hours online playing with French-oriented websites and rejecting them because I found them boring or pedagogically unhelpful. There are also sites that I skimmed over or outright dismissed as possibilities in the past that I would now consider as of possible use in my classroom. That opening of possibility is one of the most important takeaways from this course. The course readings and the ideas of my classmates/colleagues (who are also exploring new ideas) have led me to think about different ways of considering some of the tools presented. The class discussions and the links to others' projects have been especially helpful in demonstrating the usefulness of many tools. Beyond those specific tools, they have encouraged me to be more open to looking at others' lessons in many subjects and to consider how new tools or ideas used in those lessons might be used in engaging new ways for my students. For my English classes, I have found new resources and different ways to present some of the literature and grammar we will cover.

I will continue to look to my colleagues for ideas and to push myself to think just a little further about what I could do with tools presented and used in this course, and about how I can make my current classes more engaging with tools I have seen and have yet to find. I will continue to work toward an online version of my French courses, although there is no current plan in my district for implementing an online foreign language. Should an opportunity or need arise for such a course, I can have it ready to go. Meanwhile, the online course can be a way for me to play with the ideas in this course.

Social media in the classroom

I must admit that my first reaction to considering Facebook and Twitter in the classroom was not at all positive. First of all, my school blocks Facebook during school hours, presumably so that teachers and students do not waste computer time at school finding out who did what last weekend. My visions of what would happen if Facebook became available on the classroom computers involved the digital version of drawing pictures on desks. I can see students messaging each other rather than staying on task. We already know that students try to  text surreptitiously during class even though they risk losing their phones to the office for a week, so what would happen if we opened social media to them on the school computers?

For online courses, there is not the same concern as for a classroom with computer. I think that the teacher in the traditional classroom combats talking and passing notes while attempting to keep students on-task, and the same behavior would be an issue when using computers in the classroom - only in the form of IM and posting on Facebook, which would be less obvious. Because the LanSchool software was disabled, we have no way of knowing what is on the screen of any given student. It takes less than a second for a student to switch to the screen they are supposed to be working on rather than the one they are really looking at if they are off-task. Other than screen monitoring software, one solution to this would be to rearrange the labs to the configuration used by the school that hosted the technology conference earlier this summer. The computers were arranged with the students facing the walls of the classroom and the screens facing the center, where they would be clearly visible to the teacher at all times.

If, on the other hand, it is a more open idea of using Facebook and Twitter FOR the classroom, I can think of several possibilities. For a class, Facebook could be set up as a closed group and used for many different aspects of managing the class. The most basic function would be sending announcements - what was covered in class, what homework is assigned, etc. The teacher could also post links to helpful websites for further exploration. The messaging could be used to answer questions outside of class time for those who need clarification. Chat could be used between students, or between student and teacher. For student-teacher chat, the teacher could announce a time for "office hours" and be available for chat homework help (or language practice for a foreign language classroom). Students could be required to check the FB page on specific days and respond to a post as a graded assignment. One question I have with this is how to get students to the class page without being Facebook friends with them on a personal side. I have set up a page for French classes in my Facebook account, but have not yet invited any current students to the site. I am still working this out for myself.

In my opinion,Twitter is more limited by its very nature, but it could be useful for posting announcements and assignments for a class. Posting links to other sites could also be done, as could reposting appropriate tweets. For example, I already follow several French news reporting sites on Twitter, and I retweet selected posts about French news, culture, and sports. The intended audience right now is other French teachers, but once school starts, I plan to have students follow my Twitter feed and ask them to respond in class the next day. We could follow just the news about a specific topic, or have a variety of topics up for discussion. Once I have my students following, I plan to try to sort tweets through Hootsuite.

I believe that there are many ways to use social media in an educational setting, but I am still cautious about the way in which they would be used. I think that I need more time to consider the challenges of using social media during class time, but I do think that social media tools could be interesting and helpful for getting information to students and for selected activities.