The great twitter science teacher hunt

Meet Ryan Becker.

He’s an 8th grade science teacher at Woodstock Union Middle School, a UVM doctoral student and tweets under the handle @PhySci8. He and his students use twitter in their classroom, and they’re wondering how many other science teachers do the same.

“I’m very interested in how technology, and the web, can be leveraged to provide new opportunities for students to explore, experience and share science. Twitter has proven to be a tremendously versatile tool:

it enables students to follow real science, and real scientists, based on personal interests; it provides students with an expanded and authentic audience; it provides students with opportunities to practice embedded forms of literacy (both traditional and new literacies); it allows students to practice and discuss digital citizenship in an authentic manner; lastly, it can be used in surprisingly diverse ways as a formative assessment tool. Moreover, Twitter is dynamic, occurs in real-time, is multi-modal and, perhaps best of all, it’s free!

For my upcoming dissertation research at UVM, I am specifically interested in learning more about how social media is being used by others in science classrooms for teaching and learning. I am reaching out to folks who are currently using social media in their science classrooms. My hope is that feedback from these teachers will help me develop research questions, as well as consider potential study participants, methodologies and types of data, in a more informed way.

If you are using social media in your science classroom, or you know someone who is, please share this survey with them!”