On Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2015, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College (SMWC) education majors gathered on campus and participated in “Tech or Tweet,” an education Twitter chat with digital tool vendors, educators and other education majors around the world. Hosted by Maria Sellers, South Vermillion Community Schools tech integration specialist, and co-moderated by Melanie Beaver, Ph.D., education instructor at SMWC, and South Vermillion High School iCat Help Desk students, this event provided SMWC students currently in the Science of Reading and Emerging Literacy courses the opportunity to learn the value in being connected educators.
“’Tech or Tweet’ is a way to show our education majors they can knock down classroom walls and go global,” states Beaver. “Through e-learning opportunities they can be sitting in their living rooms and chatting with other teachers around the world.”
“Tech or Tweet” taught SMWC students how to harness their own professional development using Twitter and a synchronized education chat. Sellers showed participants some tech tips and how they could learn new trends online. Additionally, they went over some tech tools to use and she gave them some tutorials to review.
Students also tweeted throughout the session. Some of the corporate participants were ClassDojo, Five-Star Technologies, Learn2Earn, AnswerPad, Powtoons, ClassKick, DitchThatTextbook, NBCLearn, Symbaloo, GoNoodle and GoFormative.
“We live-streamed our tweets as our way to ‘flatten’ our classroom and extend our digital reach with 20 different tech vendors from across the country,” states Beaver. “This is a very special opportunity for education majors to see the power of leaving their digital professional footprint along with all the tech resources available to them that can increase student achievement in the K-12 classroom.”
Freshmen and sophomore education majors were in attendance. Woods Online students were also notified so they could be online to chat or tweet as well.
“This tweet chat was very upbeat and intense at the same time. There were constant ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhhs’ as the Twitterfeed was flying through all the interactions taking place,” Beaver described the students’ reactions throughout the event. “Students were fascinated with the features of the new digital tools they were discovering and the experience of a live Twitter education chat.”