is extremely valuable for using
Skype in the classroom.
• epals.com - Another website
where we can connect, communicate, and collaborate with other
educators.
o Are there other services?
• Google Hangouts (https://hangouts.google.com/)
• Viber (http://www.viber.com/en/)
Utilizing Skype in the classroom can
enhance your current curriculum, especially
if you are having your students perform for
other students. The possibilities of students
learning from other students are endless.
However, if this is not where you would like
to focus global communications in your elementary music classroom, what are other
possibilities?
Twitter In The Elementary
Music Classroom
At the BLC16 conference, I had the
great pleasure to attend Kathy Cassidy’s
workshop titled, “Build a World-Wide
Learning Community in Your Elementary
Classroom.” Kathy is a 1st grade teacher
in Canada that has successfully integrated
technology into her classroom through
multiple ways: Skype, a classroom blog, and
a classroom twitter account. In her session,
Kathy showed us how to effectively utilize
twitter in the classroom by first showing us
her classroom’s twitter account named, Cassidy’s Class. Kathy reminded us that when
you have a classroom account, it is very important to limit whom you follow so that
the classroom’s twitter feed does not become
too busy. Her classroom twitter account has
close to 4000 followers, and the class only
follows 9 people. She also states that her
classroom account is not the same as her
professional twitter account. She finds that
it is important to keep them separate, which
for privacy reasons, is ideal.
Kathy showed us two ways of tweeting
in her classroom. The first way was her writing a tweet with the entire class involved.
An example of this was the following: She
put forth the challenge of how fast her 1stgrade class could get their snow gear on at
OCTOBER 2016
the end of the day. It was amazing to see
these 6-year-olds focused and determined
to beat the clock. She tweeted the video
and the timing it took to dress themselves.
The next day, she had people replying to the
tweet by them showing their own classes’ attempts to beat their time of getting on their
snow gear. This produced a discussion from
her students from what is actually snow gear
to the ways those students were dressing
themselves. The second way of tweeting was
having her students write their own tweets.
This involved some rules that included that
she must approve all tweets before being
published and no pictures of other classmates. She does not correct her 1st-graders’
spelling or grammar because they are in 1st
grade and sounding out words and learning
how to write a sentence are all a part of the
curriculum. An example she gave was her
class tweeting to the author, Elise Gravel,
about her book, and Elise tweeting back
several times and engaging the students in a
wonderful conversation about how to write
books.
This got me thinking…How could I use
Twitter in my music classroom?
I stopped to think about that entire
process. It takes very little effort to set up
a twitter account for my classroom, from
choosing my email address to the two pictures that are associated with the twitter account. From there, I could use this account
as a way to end the music class. I could assign a “music classroom tweeter” who writes
an “I can” statement at the end of the class.
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CONCENTRATIONS IN:
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