Be a teacher found of learning

     

       The two blogs I read were A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom and BLOGS & MICROBLOGS IN THE CLASSROOM. The formal one reads like a instruction of microblogs which is twitter's potential education usage. The later one is written from the author's personal experience to show how to use microblogs in teaching.

      I like the categories of effects of twitter that A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom shows to readers. Even though I did not agree every piece of advantage of twitter in this article, I still learned a lot from it. This article classifies twitter's functions into five categories. They are separately communication, organization, resources, writing skills, and twitter exercises. My favorite function which will definitely benefit my future teaching career is resources. As I mentioned in my previous blogs, in the information era, teachers are obligated to deliver useful and helpful learning resources or tools to their students, which is better being delivered in relatively fashionable and up-to-date ways. At the same time of sharing, teachers themselves are playing the role of sponges to absorb new information all the time. For example, as mentioned in the article, teachers can ask for recommended books, teaching tools, and ideals of lessons, crowdsourcing resources for the classroom. 

      I believe even the very experienced teacher also needs to contact with  new educational information all the time. Twitter is definitely a great online public forum for teachers to learn, to follow up-to-date information. When teachers expect that students have a great attitude of learning, we should have it first.  After that, students will be affected by this attitude not from teachers' repeatedly advice but from teachers' behavior. And it is true that more and more public departments and experts are running their own twitter or microblogs. Through twitter, teachers can grab newest information from the most official statements. Or teachers can consult with experts some difficult questions even we do not have chances to meet them personally.

      The first article did not convince me of twitter's function in the field of writing skills. I remembered that I debated the topic--Can Weibo Improve Chinese Writing Level? (Weibo is like Chinese style Twitter) when I was a sophomore. I supported CAN but I lost the debate. However, in the second article BLOGS & MICROBLOGS IN THE CLASSROOM, I found the real answer. In this article, Maggie suggested that when improve writing skills, writers could use microblogs to character figure's development, gather evidence for and idea, debate an idea, and give feedback to other writers. But what I can think about year ago was that how to use 140 characters to write a fabulous passage. Now I know that I employed a wrong perspective. The key is not writing itself but information. Writing is an academic activity needs large amount of information. And twitter is great place to obtain information effectively. Once I am enlightened the way to use twitter in improving writing skills, I can teach myself with more confidence.