It has been a necessity to select and use popular information technologies depending on the content of the course in order to meet the learning needs. In this study, the following of up-to-date information about disasters was ensured in “Geography of Disasters” course during a semester by using Twitter, some information, precautions and news about the disasters both in Turkey and around the world were shared, the contributions and comments were done related to them in a variety of periods. Teacher candidates were asked to reply the tweets about the future of the earth shared by the lecturer. With the application of Twitter, it was aimed for teacher candidates to express their information or thoughts within 140 characters, to have knowledge about the information technologies; to raise awareness of disasters happened in Turkey, to find solutions related to them, and to share their solutions in-person. The study group was composed of 65 teacher candidates with 35 women and 30 men. In the data collection tool, there are questions about their twitter usage before/and in educational setting, and 23-item content-based test with 5-point likert type. As a result of the study, teacher candidates indicated that they had information about disasters both happened in the past and present, their motivation towards the lesson raised, their ability to comment on the disasters developed thanks to Twitter, they didn’t use Twitter in an educational setting before but when they became teachers, they would certainly use it, and finally the communication within the classroom improved.
Ayse Akkurt, Gaziosmanpasa University, Turkey
Stream: Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom
This paper is part of the ECTC2014 Conference Proceedings (View)
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