I have decided to implement Twitter as a regular feature in one of my English classes this coming year. It’s still very much in the planning stages now, but I hope to have a full outline of my thought process, intended goals/objectives, and initial instructional implementation up here by the end of the weekend or early next week. Throughout the coming semester, I’ll post lessons & uses, successes & failures, my reflections, and student reactions. Of course, the safety and anonymity of my students are among my primary concerns here, so you’ll understand if I have to be vague and non-specific from time to time.
If you are interested in using Twitter as an educational tool, I hope you’ll stay tuned and contribute thoughts and questions to the mix as this project evolves. I’ll be tagging all relevant posts as “Twitteracy Project” for your ease in following.
Top idea. I’ve got a couple of ideas, although they’re both for lessons I know I won’t be teaching next year so I need to try and adapt them.
Basic idea is to use Twittercamp and get pupils to use their phones to twit a question about a source (probably a song) they’ve got. Once the question’s been asked it can’t be asked again. They then nominate a question they want to find the answer to and work on it. That’s where it gets a bit sketchy! I think there might be a wiki involved to track answers but it will need further pondering.
Good luck though, can’t wait to see how you get on with it!
Sounds cool. I will stay tuned. I’m not sure how I would use Twitter, so I am focusing on some other tools right now. I can’t wait to hear how your project goes! Maybe it will inspire me to use it with my kids. Good luck and look forward to hearing about it!
Dave – This is mostly for you – How is using Twitter in the situation you’re describing above any better than using a chalk/whiteboard or even a wiki to record that information? Why does it need to be Twitter?
Damian – Interested to see what you do. Convince me that there’s a need that Twitter fills in the classroom. I love Twitter – but I’m concerned – I see people forcing its use for no particular reason other than that it’s Twitter. As I said – convince me.
I’d have to agree with Bud. I’ve been thinking about Twitter for a few months now, wondering if it’s useful for the classroom, but not coming up with much. I’ll be interested to see what you do.
Bud is on target here. Tweeting for the sake of tweeting is odd. Its value is, at best, an abstraction. Will Richardson’s “exchange” best captures the odd quality of Twitter.