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Google Classroom: Mission control for students and teachers

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Every class is on a mission. Now, with Google Classroom, we have a mission control. Designed with teachers and students, it helps easily connect the class, track their progress and achieve more together. Visit http://g.co/classroom to learn more.

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Educators are now using the videoconferencing tool to connect foreign-language students to native speakers, hold virtual field trips and host conversations with scientists and other experts

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Imagine taking your class on an "around the world" field trip or having your favorite children's author lead today's read-aloud. You can do both of these and more without leaving your classroom thanks to Skype. It's a great use of technology in the classroom!

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Find and save recipes, parenting hacks, style inspiration and other ideas to try.

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Professors who wish to engage students during large lectures face an uphill battle. Not only is it a logistical impossibility for 200+ students to actively participate in a 90 minute lecture, but the downward sloping cone-shape of a lecture hall induces a one-to-many conversation. This problem is compounded by the recent budget cuts that have squeezed ever more students into each room.

Fortunately, educators (including myself) have found that Twitter is an effective way to broaden participation in lecture. Additionally, the ubiquity of laptops and smartphones have made the integration of Twitter a virtually bureaucracy-free endeavor. This post describes the two main benefits professors find when using Twitter in lecture.

Increased Participation

Classroom shyness is like a blackhole: Once silence takes over, it never lets go. In my own experience, in a class of hundreds, the fraction of students who speak up is small, and a still tinier fraction contribute regularly.

That's why, Dr. Monica Rankin of the University of Texas at Dallas was pleasantly surprised when her experiment with Twitter began pulling more students into discussion. "It's been really exciting because, in classes like this, you'll have three people who talk about the discussion material, and so to actually have 30 or 40 people at the same time talking about it is really interesting," said Megan Malone, Teaching Assistant to Dr. Monica Rankin's United States history course, in the video below.

During lecture, students tweet comments or questions via laptop or cell phone, while the TA and Dr. Rankin respond to a real-time feed displayed prominently in front of the room. Students who manage to live off the grid for 50 minutes can still pass in hand-written notes for the TA to tweet after class.

Students in another Twitter-friendly classroom at Purdue University agree that digital communication helps overcome the shyness barrier. "It's just an easy way to answer questions in class without embarrassing yourself and raising your hand in a big lecture hall," said one student. Studies frequently discover that greater participation translates into better academic performance, motivation, and a likelihood of adopting different points of view, which is why it is so striking that Twitter can foster that type of communication.

A Community of Learners

The dynamic of an intellectual ecosystem, where students dive deep into class readings and argue contentious issues outside of class, is difficult to create if discussion ends when class is over. Fortunately, Twitter has no time limit. In fact, Dr. Rankin's colleague David Parry, Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas, found that Twitter chatter during class spilled over into the students' free time.

"The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class," Parry wrote. "Once students started Twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half." As a result, classroom conversation became more productive as "people were more willing to talk, and [be] more respectful of others."

Parry's experience is in line with results of one of the first education studies of Twitter, which found that students do indeed carry on discussion outside of the classroom.

In part, students find themselves checking the feed after hours because the public trail of Twitter chatter doubles as an excellent study aid. As one student from Rankin's class put it, "The significant terms that we've talked about in discussions, we'll tweet that, and you can [go] back [to] that, and it's a pretty good study aid." This, in turn, keeps Twitter on their minds, fueling the cycle of involvement.

Conclusion

For schools hit hard by the recession, Twitter is an inexpensive solution to the growing problem of increasing class sizes. It is a tried-and-true platform to let conversations flourish. Indeed, Dr. Parry declared that "it was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I've ever done teaching."

More social media resources from Mashable:

- 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology
- The Science of Building Trust With Social Media
- Social Media Can Change The World Through Common Ground
- 5 Ways Social Media Is Changing Our Daily Lives
- How Social Media is Taking the News Local

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, lisapics

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How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Professors who wish to engage students during large lectures face an uphill battle. Not only is it a logistical impossibility for 200+ students to actively participate in a 90 minute lecture, but the downward sloping cone-shape of a lecture hall induces a one-to-many conversation.