Tech for Collaborating.
Two t-titled tools - Twitter + Teams - to tie teachers together.
As 21st-century educators, we are called upon to perform a variety of roles. This week’s posts are highlighting online tools that can help us with these tasks.
Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash
Professional Collaboration - Twitter
Twitter is a cesspool. Except when it isn’t.
The excesses of tweeters are well known. They spread hate and extremist lies. They gang up on people they don’t like. They post way too many GIFs and memes.
Academic Twitter is often no better. The snark can sometimes be funny or even enlightening, but the narcissism, the selfies, the humblebragging and the bragging bragging, the self promotion and the image management, the posturing and the virtue signalling are over the top. Then there are the profs who call critics sacks of whatever or tell them to go and do something to themselves, or the profs - often the same ones as the name callers - who decry the level of discourse on Twitter without having enough self-awareness to realize that their yelling and name-calling are lowering that discourse.
Even so, Twitter is a real boon to educators. There are who wish to collaborate, especially during a pandemic that isolates us, and Twitter can provide the seeds for such connections. A lot of educators at every level are extremely generous with what they’ll share online, often through blogs like this one, and Twitter is one of the best ways to find out about these posts. You start getting to know those educators who view Twitter as a way of curating and amplifying the work of others, and by following them you can tap into whole networks of people thinking about the things you’re thinking about. This is especially useful if you are interested in developing a Personal Learning Network in order to foster your own professional development and learning.
Professional and Student Collaboration - Microsoft Teams
I’ve been using Microsoft Teams all year to manage the research centre I direct, and both the administrative assistant and I have grown to really appreciate its usefulness. We basically do our work for the centre from within Teams, and we find it increases our collaboration and communication. So I decided to use Teams this fall to teach a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning.
There are some negatives to Teams. If you’re not familiar with it, it has a bit of a learning curve before you become comfortable with its structure of channels and tabs and other tabs. It’s like visiting a city for the first time and you’re kind of disoriented until one day you suddenly feel, ahh, now I know where I am. But that learning curve can annoy students (and others): they want to hit the ground running, and if they enter a space and can’t immediately find what they’re looking for, they get grumpy.
Teams also has some quirks: the wiki, which I used a lot in my course, has one of those hamburger patty menus that you don’t realize might be hiding all sorts of information that’s in the wiki; there are all sorts of places where you can “chat” with colleagues, and you become uncertain if what you’ve posted is reaching the intended audience; only a limited number of channels will automatically appear in the user’s account, which leads you as an instructor to wonder whether they’re getting a whole overview of the course and its materials.
But Teams also has some advantages:
Teams is less didactic than an LMS - it’s about group collaboration and multi-directional communication, not information transfer from an instructor to students. I didn’t make full use of the collaborative possibilities, but Teams would work especially well in a course where there is a group project component because it gives you all the tools you need to work on documents together, chat asynchronously or synchronously, etc.;
Teams eliminates the need for email exchanges with students; it can all be done with chat. If that doesn’t make you happy, Mr. Scrooge, nothing will;
while Teams doesn’t have the same kind of discussion forum structure you’ll find in a typical LMS, it does allow you to have discussions that take place right with the content (but as noted above, these can be confusing and a bit unwieldy);
with Teams, students are members, which gives them a lot of control - they can create their own channels and spaces to do the work they want to do.
You’ll hear people say “Teams is a disaster - just use Zoom!” The Teams video chat isn’t as good as Zoom’s - it has less flexibility and the recordings aren’t as good. But if you’re using Teams just for video calls, you’re missing the point. Zoom is a communication tool, Teams is a collaboration suite. It’s not as easy to use as Zoom because it provides so much more than Zoom.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 58/60.