{"id":941,"date":"2012-10-03T18:22:53","date_gmt":"2012-10-03T22:22:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/technology\/?p=2571"},"modified":"2012-10-03T18:22:53","modified_gmt":"2012-10-03T22:22:53","slug":"professor-randy-piland-uses-twitter-in-the-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/2012\/10\/03\/professor-randy-piland-uses-twitter-in-the-classroom\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Randy Piland Uses #Twitter in the Classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Elon University classrooms are gaining followers in the\u00a0Twittersphere<\/a>. 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 \u201cmicro-blogging\u201d platform into a global community.<\/p>\n

With the introduction of Twitter feed widgets on\u00a0Moodle<\/a>, Elon professors are sharing subject-related material from outside sources in order to enhance their students\u2019 educational experiences.<\/p>\n

Randy Piland,\u00a0School of Communications senior lecturer and faculty fellow for technology, has added\u00a0Twitter<\/a> feeds to his classes’ Moodle pages as a way to provide supplementary resources and information to his students.<\/p>\n

<\/span>\u201cI feel like if a student really takes advantage of it, [Twitter] can be very enlightening because there\u2019s new information coming in all the time,\u201d Piland said.<\/p>\n

For each course he teaches, Piland creates a\u00a0list<\/a>, 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\u00a0Associated Press<\/a>,\u00a0MediaStorm<\/a> and\u00a0PetaPixel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI try to make [the Twitter feed] specific to the type of course it is, so students can get new information about that,\u201d Piland said. \u201cI feel like it\u2019s an enhancement. You can\u2019t make Moodle very active, so Twitter gives it a little life since the feeds are live and constantly changing.\u201d<\/p>\n

This semester, Piland is taking Twitter to the next level to ensure the technology is engaging his students.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m going to pull things from the tweets this semester and assign them, so we can talk about it in class,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ll say, \u2018Go to this tweet, and let\u2019s look at this information and see how we can use it in our class.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 national conventions and the presidential election.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, a lot of things are coming over [via Twitter] about the\u00a0Republican National Convention, so [professors could discuss] different types of rules or codes of conduct concerning that event,\u201d he said. \u201cThose [tweets] are moving pretty regularly, so [professors could] probably look at a lot of the campaign stuff this fall.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cbusiness\u201d or \u201ceconomics\u201d to find and include\u00a0The Economist<\/a> or\u00a0The New York Times Business<\/a> on their lists.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re teaching in the MBA program, and you\u2019re looking for MBA-related information, then you could search\u00a0MBA [on Twitter] and find all kinds of information,\u201d Piland said.<\/p>\n

Piland explained professors could also feed in a website\u2019s pages, instead of tweets, using the same format on Moodle. However, because of Moodle\u2019s size restrictions, he said large webpages don\u2019t fit nicely into the narrow columns.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you could sit down and do it all in one time period, and everything came to you right away, it wouldn\u2019t take you a half hour to do it all,\u201d he said. \u201cBut, 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\u2019s not that time-consuming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Check out these step-by-step instructions<\/a> on how to embed a Twitter feed onto your Moodle page.<\/p>\n

For further help and ideas, check out past stories<\/a> about Twitter written by the Teaching and Learning Technologies department.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elon University classrooms are gaining followers in the\u00a0Twittersphere. 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 \u201cmicro-blogging\u201d platform into a global community. With the introduction of Twitter feed widgets on\u00a0Moodle, Elon professors are sharing subject-related material from outside sources in … Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":142,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[338,50,27867,21426,27870,736,795,27872,6361,744,27876,737,27877,27878],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elon","category-elon-university","category-elon-university-school-of-communications","category-moodle","category-randy-piland","category-social-media","category-teaching-and-learning","category-teaching-and-learning-technologies","category-technology","category-tlt","category-tweets","category-twitter","category-twitter-list","category-twittersphere"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/142"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elon.edu\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}