I have found Twiducate to be the perfect Web 2.0 tool to use for my AR project because it's a social network for schools. With this tool I hope to be able to motivate and increase my students English language fluency outside the classroom in a safe virtual environment.
Who are the developers of Twiducate? Teachers! Therefore, this social network gives you all the benefits of a social network like Twitter by allowing you to include discussions, pictures, and links, but it also allows teachers to post deadlines, homework, and surveys.
What are the benefits of Twiducate? One of the best features I have found is that it helps facilitate the management of all your classes, as well as, making it user friendly for both teachers and students. For example, teachers are able to add multiple classes in their page, navigate between classes, and add all their students names under the corresponding class. The system automatically generates each students' password or the teacher can create it. Therefore, each student is able to login to their classroom making it safe to use and easy to manage by the teacher. Although this is a great Web 2.0 tool there are a couple of downfalls.
First of all, it's important to keep in mind that Twiducate is social network for schools; therefore, it is limited in includes features that we are used to seeing in social networks. For example you can't add music or videos directly into your post, instead you would have to add it as a bookmark. You also can't add pictures from your personal file, you can only add pictures from a url link. As for your profile picture, you can only choose from the avatar pictures that the site provides. Further, Twiducate is a new Web 2.0 tool and is still being developed to provide teachers and students with all the necessary features.
Overall, Twiducate is a great educational social network tool that you can use in schools unlike other social websites that are blocked by firewalls and administrators. Despite the downfalls, it serves the purpose of collaborating into with your students outside the classroom and gives teachers control and easy management of their classrooms. I'm already using it to share information with my critical friends and I will definitely use it for my AR project.
You have done an excellent job at detailing the benefits Twiducate offers to the educational environment; the safety features, the ability to organize classes, students and school work, and that teachers have created it and will continue to improve on it. I, however, am more curious with your opening statement as to how you plan to use it in motivating and increasing the fluency of your students.
ReplyDeleteDo you plan on the students mostly communicating with you and other members in the classroom or will some of the assignments require them seeking out pen pals from other schools or from their neighborhoods who are fluent in English? Also, what type of topics will you use to motivate the students to write enough content with a continuous conversation that they will come back to over and over again? Will they be about school or more on a personal level such as family, hobbies, sports involvement, etc.? It will be interesting to see how this works for you.
Thanks for the feedback and the questions!
ReplyDeleteWhat I plan to do is include discussion topics for the class as a whole, like what we are doing for for our class with the Wetpaint wiki. I will include topics of their interests, learning environment, and links for them to watch and comment.
First, I hope this will motivate them to communicate in English outside the classroom because they really don't have the opportunity or are too shy to do this with other students on their own. Second, I hope to increase their English speaking confidence with the help of this safe social network environment. Third, if they are motivated and confident, then they are more relaxed and willing to speak and thus increase their English fluency.
Further, I'm going to create an English club where we can meet and speak in English. I'm also going to look for a project for my classes to communicate with English natives speakers through ePals. I think it's very important and more motivational for them to communicate with other natives speakers besides me because they don't have the opportunity to do that here.