Monday 14 December 2009

Reflection - 'Twitter for the Teaching Professional' session

The first Technology Enhanced Learning Series session had to be moved to D438. The room is laid out with PCs, but the room is not designed for teaching as it is normally used as open access for students. The session had six staff members attending which is one more than I will be able to accommodate in the normal training room.

The session plan had to be changed as it was not possible to have a digital projector and screen. I enrolled all the staff onto the new Community of Practice site on Moodle to allow the staff to view the presentation I was going to project onto the wall.

Not so good...
The session was a lot slower than I had hoped as Twitter did not make the new users available for others to follow during the session (took too long). This meant that I had to re-assess how I was going to teach it. I decided to use my own Twitter account to show the type of professional people I followed and how to find others. One staff member quickly found my link to sceenr and downloaded it... worked well.

Good...
The Technology Enhanced Learning Series is now launched.
Twitter is understood by more staff especially how easy it is to protect yourself and if necessary delete the account.
The Community of Practice Moodle site is also launched with staff members registered.

Reflection...
The main positive outcomes of the session were to allow the staff to see the how easy it was to setup a Twitter account (and also to delete it if necessary). I was able to highlight how I use it with my professional peers. The Community of Practice site is now live and more staff are aware of both the Child Protection Policy and the Safe Guarding Children policy. I will now encourage the attendees to share their Twitter names and get them linked to each other.

The most IMPORTANT lesson I personally learnt was to set-up a set of accounts for Twitter and Facebook etc for staff to use in these sessions. They may then setup their own personal accounts at the end or after the session.

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