BP3_Twiducate

Twiducate is an educator’s version of Twitter. It claims to be a safe, invite only type of an environment where educators can readily and informally communicate with students.

At the start it seems fairly simple to use. Easy “sign up” steps and a user friendly interface allows a new user to figure out some of the features quite easily.  Teachers are the managers of the site and therefore are the ones to distribute usernames and passwords. This is probably the nicest feature as it keeps the group private.

Once the teacher profile is complete (very general questions), one can begin adding students by clicking on the “Students” tab at the top of the page. One could also add other teachers – this could prove very effective if working in a cluster, team or co-teach model. These names can be managed at any time allowing the flexibility of adding new students or deleting ones who have departed.

The interface is extremely easy to use and seems to follow the general “blog post” format. Textual edits such typeface, alignment and even adding photographs appear at the top of the blog box.

Other tools Twiducate offers are an “Important Dates” tab where teachers could input due dates for projects, tests, etc. There is also a section for “Class Bookmarks” where pertinent websites could be posted for student resource.

There are a few things that make this a quality product for teachers:

1.     Closed private setting so that others cannot corrupt a class discussion.

2.     Extremely easy and logical interface layout – everything is located where one would think it would be.

3.     The important dates and links pages offer more of a resource than simply the online discussion forum.

4.     It appears to be a very stable site. I’ve used it and “pushed” the limits by uploading heavy materials and photographs and it hasn’t crashed. That’s always nice. J

I would like to utilize this in my 11^th grade History of the Americas classes. I’m not sure how valuable it will prove to be because of my students’ limited access to the internet and technology, but I feel it is certainly worth trying. I am going to start with posting exam or essay hints. The hints will inevitably help the students on the assignment – that way maybe more will find a way to log on! Eventually I would love to have a discussion forum on there where I could actually facilitate and grade students’ discussions online and incorporate it as part of the class.

I suppose there are a number of sites that operate like this one – Wiki, moodle, Ngrade, but the easy to manage interface is sort of endearing. The only thing that is really annoying is the login procedure where the user may have to watch an advertisement before logging in.