Last week Beth Still recommended to me that I check out HootCourse. Beth teaches online courses for high school students so I knew that if she liked it, I had to give it a serious look. HootCourse uses Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, and Xanga to create a conversation channel for your courses.
At its most basic HootCourse is a platform on which you can create a conversation channel which HootCourse calls "courses". Your students can post comments and questions in the course you create. If your students have Twitter or Facebook accounts they can login using those accounts to post messages. Students can also post messages in Twitter, use the hashtag you assign to your course, and then HootCourse will pull all of their Tweets into your course. If students need to write more than 140 characters they have their posts on Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, or Xanga appear in your HootCourse course.
Update: apparently if you login into HootCourse using your Twitter account and make your course public, all of your messages appear in HootCourse as well as on Twitter.
Applications for Education
HootCourse categorizes students' messages into comments, questions, and links. Anytime a student uses a question mark in a message, that message will appear in a column just for questions. If you're using HootCourse as a backchannel during a presentation the questions column will make it easy to find the questions your audience is asking.
Last winter I used a backchannel during a classroom viewing of the movie Glory. In the backchannel I had students asking questions as well as posting comments. HootCourse would have made it easier for me to address my students' questions in a timely manner.
By providing your course with a category for messages containing links, HootCourse could be useful for sharing of links that are relevant to your course discussions.
Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Neat Chat - Quickly Create an Ad-Free Chatroom
Five Platforms for Classroom Back-channel Chat
Back-channeling During a Class Viewing of Glory
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
HootCourse - A Classroom Application for Twitter
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4 comments:
Thanks so much for the writeup! We need all the help we can get spreading the word and we're really looking forward to hearing feedback from your readers.
It seems that there is a bit of confusion between private vs public courses, so I'll try to shed some light on that. We'll also take a look at the course creation screen to see if we can make the difference between the two clearer.
Right now, the content of public courses (including posts from students) can be seen on hootcourse.com by anyone on the web: http://hootcourse.com/course/1/ Additionally, anyone with the URL of a public course can join that course.
On the other hand, private courses show up like the following for non-members: http://hootcourse.com/course/2/ These courses have obfuscated join URLs. Instructors can privately share that URL so only their students can sign into their course.
The "Message to *course*" form in HootCourses can be viewed as a shortcut for either the twitter.com tweet form or the facebook.com status update form (depending on what service the user logged in with). Anything posted with that form will appear in the course and appear on that user's twitter or facebook timeline. We want students to engage their friends and family about the topics they're learning about and we think this feature in particular will go a long way towards making that happen.
As an added bonus, Twitter users can post content to their courses using their favorite twitter client simply by tweeting something that includes their course's hashtag.
Oh, I almost forgot... I'm Thomas, one of the developers working on HootCourse. :)
Looks fascinating. Help us understand more about the privacy implications.
Nice tool. I will try it with my students.
Just found this post as they have surfaced again and seem to still be in Beta. I too believe the term course is misleading but as a backchannel option it works well if you have all your kids in a computer lab
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