Social Media and BYOD
I recently attended one of those mind-numbing meetings that all of us academics are summoned to from time to time. In order to mitigate the meeting’s effects, I brought along my iPad, so I could take notes and respond to my students on Twitter. Before the meeting began, I was tweeting away when a tie-wearing colleague from the IT department sat down in front of me. I looked up and greeted him, and he pointed to my iPad: “Man, if I could just convince my students that those are tools and not toys my life would be a lot easier.” I considered this for a moment and replied: “Can they be both?” Before we could continue our discussion, the meeting began, but I’ve been considering his statement ever since.
If I want to incorporate the use of digital devices in my classroom to encourage students to participate and to explore, the best way to achieve this, it seemed to me, was to encourage them...