Social media expands the classroom

Charlotte Clark:

When asked about the use of social media tools in the classroom, Mike Nicholson, director of global learning at Durham University Business School in the UK, fondly remembers an ex-colleague, now retired, who used to position a bucket of water at the front of his classroom with the label: Phone disposal unit.

"He actually would drop phones into it if he found students using them in class," he says, laughing at how times have changed since then. Indeed, in spite of his own initial misgivings, he has adapted his teaching technique to suit the growing trends of social media in education.

Or, as he would say, "flipped" things round so that he delivers lectures via YouTube video clips, to be watched at home and then sets his students work to do when they come to class, integrating Twitter and Vine, a mobile app by Twitter that enables its users to create and post short video clips.

"It's working really well," Dr Nicholson says. When he first set the task of using Vine to explain what Apple should do next, his students split into groups and were moving all round the school filming things. The six second limit of Vine worked like the 140 character limit of Twitter in ensuring they remained succinct in their responses.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 14, 2013 1:21 AM
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