Following the face-to-face session

The objective of this course activity is to make contact with participants of the face-to-face session and to have the opportunity to share ideas emerging from the course so far.

The course forum is available to all participants in the course after the end of the two-hour facilitated session. It will be moderated by your facilitator.

Go to the forum and post a message to the other participants. You may wish to reflect on the course so far, or post some ideas about whether you feel Twitter has a role to play for you personally, professionally or pedagogically. You may wish to reflect on issues around making Twitter accessible for learners in school and share information about making a case for allowing the site through the firewall.

The objective of this course activity is to plan to use a live Twitter feed in a lesson with a group of suitable learners, where they can provide comment and feedback during the lesson through tweeting.

The first step is to ensure that your school is able to make Twitter available for classroom use. This may mean making a short case for its use in the classroom on the basis of tapping into new technology and controlled social networking to promote collaborative contributions to a learning activity. This will have been discussed in the face-to-face session and you should feel able to reflect on the pedagogical benefits of Twitter in this case.

Plan a lesson where learners can access Twitter for a short period of time to make contributions to the learning activity. The context of this will depend on your own programmes of study and what is coming up within the time frame of the course.

Many activities lend themselves to student input, and this need only take place for 10–15 minutes of the lesson. This will give you the opportunity to evaluate the success of this strategy for student engagement and learning. If possible, and if your network manager agrees to allow Twitter through the firewall, implement your plan and reflect on its success and whether it could be used more extensively in your lessons. You can reflect on your progress with implementing your plan with other participants in the course forum.