Twitter based Assingment

In the article STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF A TWITTERBASED ASSIGNMENT IN A GRADUATE-LEVEL INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY COURSE it is an insightful article about the challenge of learning while using technology.  If further discusses three students’ obstacles and achievements while using technology as a medium.  Some of the obstacles using twitter were character limitation, phone compatibility; or learning how to use twitter efficiently to do the assignment.  Many times the students felt that they even thought they were completing the assignments they were not able to respond to post without it being a hassle or they had to hunt for the thread to respond to a person’s tweet.  Other times they felt that due to the character limitation that meaningful conversations were not able to happen often time leaving them frustrated.    A negative and positive aspect was that the student felt they were more focused on the assignment and were doing the assignment even when they were not meaning to, they felt there was not a switch to turn off the assignments.  This was viewed as negative and positive by the students, some students saw that the assignment was being done without thought and had to intentional stop and post and respond later others felt that the assignments were intruding in on their personal life that there was no separation.  Overall using this technology while they students thought it would be a technology medium that was be useful most did not like the technology as a whole. 

This article to me proved that just using technology in the classroom is not a good reason to use technology.  When using technology in the classroom you have to think with the end in mind.  What is the outcome that you want the technology to achieve?    Who is using the technology and is it a good fit for all the users.  In education we have students who are gifted, normal, below normal and special.  Technology is not a one size fits all while reading this article I found that there were things that the students liked but more importantly there were limitations that hindered the creativity of the students.  Most of the time the students felt frustrated trying to use the technology medium designed for this course when doing assignments.  As a teacher this is what you want to avoid at all cost.  The lesson I took away is technology can be a wonderful outlet but as a teacher using the technology or assigning the technology it need to enhance the lessons not hinder the learning of the student.   

Nygard, S., Day, M., Fricke, G., & Knowlton, D. S. (2014). STUDENTS' PERCEPTIONS OF A TWITTERBASED ASSIGNMENT IN A GRADUATE-LEVEL INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY COURSE. Quarterly Review Of Distance Education, 15(4), 1-14.