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Countdown: Campus Technologies’ most popular blog posts: #6

Number Six

With 126 total pageviews, “Twitter in higher education” by Casey Brown secured number six on our list. The blog post highlights who is using Twitter in higher education as well as how to use it. Read the post.

The Countdown

As the semester comes to a close, Campus Technologies took a look at its Top 12 most popular blog posts of the semester. This fall, on the Technology blog, we published 53 posts, and those posts had 9,021 total pageviews. Among our most popular posts, Moodle and mobile device technology were the most prominent themes.

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Professor Randy Piland Uses #Twitter in the Classroom

Randy Piland, School of Communications senior lecturer and faculty fellow for technology, uses Twitter feeds on his Moodle pages to provide supplementary resources and information to his students.

Elon University classrooms are gaining followers in the Twittersphere. Twitter, the social networking site that promotes free expression in 140 characters or less, has grown in popularity since its 2006 debut. It has evolved from a pure “micro-blogging” platform into a global community.

With the introduction of Twitter feed widgets on Moodle, Elon professors are sharing subject-related material from outside sources in order to enhance their students’ educational experiences.

Randy Piland, School of Communications senior lecturer and faculty fellow for technology, has added Twitter feeds to his classes’ Moodle pages as a way to provide supplementary resources and information to his students.

“I feel like if a student really takes advantage of it, [Twitter] can be very enlightening because there’s new information coming in all the time,” Piland said.

For each course he teaches, Piland creates a list, or curated group of Twitter users that share a common theme, on his Twitter account. On each list, he includes users that tweet about relevant information to the subject he is teaching. For example, he said for his photojournalism class, he complied a list of media organizations, photography agencies and camera technology sites associated with the photojournalism field. Some example accounts on this list are the Associated PressMediaStorm and PetaPixel.

“I try to make [the Twitter feed] specific to the type of course it is, so students can get new information about that,” Piland said. “I feel like it’s an enhancement. You can’t make Moodle very active, so Twitter gives it a little life since the feeds are live and constantly changing.”

This semester, Piland is taking Twitter to the next level to ensure the technology is engaging his students.

“I’m going to pull things from the tweets this semester and assign them, so we can talk about it in class,” he said. “I’ll say, ‘Go to this tweet, and let’s look at this information and see how we can use it in our class.”

But, Twitter feeds are not just useful in communications classes, Piland warns. For political science courses, he recommends professors implement the technology on Moodle, so students can read about coverage of political parties’ national conventions and the presidential election.

“Right now, a lot of things are coming over [via Twitter] about the Republican National Convention, so [professors could discuss] different types of rules or codes of conduct concerning that event,” he said. “Those [tweets] are moving pretty regularly, so [professors could] probably look at a lot of the campaign stuff this fall.”

For other departments, Piland said professors need only search keywords they would like to discuss in class. For economics or business courses, for example, professors would need to search “business” or “economics” to find and include The Economist or The New York Times Business on their lists.

“If you’re teaching in the MBA program, and you’re looking for MBA-related information, then you could search MBA [on Twitter] and find all kinds of information,” Piland said.

Piland explained professors could also feed in a website’s pages, instead of tweets, using the same format on Moodle. However, because of Moodle’s size restrictions, he said large webpages don’t fit nicely into the narrow columns.

In terms of time requirements, Piland said if a professor has a few organizations or individuals in mind before creating his or her list, the entire process could take only thirty minutes.

“If you could sit down and do it all in one time period, and everything came to you right away, it wouldn’t take you a half hour to do it all,” he said. “But, this is stuff you gather over a period of time, and it might just be a couple of minutes a couple times a week to gather stuff based on what you read or see online or search for it. It’s not that time-consuming.”

Check out these step-by-step instructions on how to embed a Twitter feed onto your Moodle page.

For further help and ideas, check out past stories about Twitter written by the Teaching and Learning Technologies department.

Also posted in Elon, Elon University, Elon University School of Communications, Moodle, Randy Piland, Social Media, Teaching and Learning, Teaching and Learning Technologies, Technology, TLT, tweets, Twitter list, Twittersphere | Comments Off on Professor Randy Piland Uses #Twitter in the Classroom

UPDATE: Easily add current, course-relevant news to your Moodle courses

News TickerUPDATE: This post was updated on 9/12/2012 after Twitter changed its widget creator.

Ideas for using Twitter in higher education are easy to find. One simple way to use Twitter is to embed a widget into your Moodle course. Embedding Twitter into Moodle is an easy way to add current, course-relevant news and opinions to your course. Twitter is full of companies, news organizations, non-profits, professional associations, activists, politicians, celebrities and more – nearly every discipline can find something of value on Twitter. It’s easy, and you don’t even need a Twitter account (though you’ll have more options if you do) and all you need is a Twitter account. This post includes ideas for using Twitter in Moodle and step-by-step instructions for adding a Twitter widget to your Moodle course.

Continue reading »

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This Week in Tweets: August 17, 2012

In case you missed it, here’s what @elontechnology and @elonteaching have been tweeting this week. If you aren’t using using Twitter yet, learn how to get started.

  • Twitter BirdElon Teaching and Learning Technologies staff participate in the 9th annual Teaching and Learning Conference. http://fb.me/1JAcPfkHj
  • We had a great conference yesterday. Conference attendees: What was your biggest take-away? #ElonTLC
  • Watch Ashley Finley’s plenary session “How to hit a moving target: assessing engaged learning” http://youtu.be/qOEFPmWkCy4 #ElonTLC

 

 

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This Week in Tweets: August 3, 2012

In case you missed it, here’s what @elontechnology and @elonteaching have been tweeting this week. If you aren’t using using Twitter yet, learn how to get started.Twitter Bird

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This Week in Tweets: July 27, 2012

In case you missed it, here’s what @elontechnology and @elonteaching have been tweeting this week. If you aren’t using using Twitter yet, learn how to get started.

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This Week in Tweets: July 20, 2012

In case you missed it, here’s what @elontechnology and @elonteaching have been tweeting the last 2 weeks. If you aren’t using using Twitter yet, learn how to get started.

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