Classroom Twittering

MassCue Session 5 – 10:00 – 10:55
Classroom Twittering
Michael Purdy, Director of Technology, Hanover Public Schools
(also good resource to discuss Google Apps for Schools)

Twitter creator on Iran: "I never intended for Twitter to be useful." Jack Dorsey - The Onion (6.24.09)

25-40 year olds are most active on Twitter.

Twitter is micro-blogging (140 characters).

Lifeblogging: Is a virtual brain good for the real one?

Proof! Mobile microbloggers are boring...

Lifebloggers track their every move, every word, every document with computers to create a personalized and machine-readable memory archive. Skeptics argue that no one wants to remember this much.

Why tweet?

• instantaneous
• direct
• feels personal
• searchable
• available and flexible

Terminology / How-to:

• delete your account (it is a consumable product, can delete easily)
  
• direct message (D)
  
• @message
• Retweet (RT)
• Hashtag (#)
• URL shorteners

Block unwanted followers - porn trawlers will follow you.

Issues:

• email addresses: get a gmail acccount and use "aliases" to have more than one account to mail to
• student email - huge issue in Web 2.0 world

Hanover PS uses Twitter for:

• job postings
• each school has an account for easy notification of parents who follow the school

(note to self: set up Twitter acct for library)

Teacher as Professional Learner

• self-reflection on teaching process
• member of prof learning community

General Education

• student poses question regarding class
  
• students consult one another about homework or other issues (student experts)
• create a review space for quizzes, tests that can accumulate as students head towards midterms or finals

Precis Writing
Condense "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson into 140 characters - good use of Twitter. Teaches incisive writing and thinking, main idea, key points, sentence combining.

Grammar / Vocabulary

• have students punctuate a paragraph that has punctuation removed
• have students write a sentence that properly illustrates the meaning of a vocabulary words

Literature

• students microblog as characters from within a literary work; they must reveal the motivation of character as it relates to plot
• students create online lexicon of literary terms covered in class with examples from the reading
• Twitter book club
• rewrite a play capturing its essence

Newsroom

• follow tweets of historical occurrences
• journalism classes can report on school-based news events as they happen
• journalism report events outside school

Debate

• debate assigned topics within twitter forum

Social Studies

• explain main point of great speeches
• create a study site of these speeches with interpretation
• students microblog in real time from an historical event ex the Kennedy assassination or Gettysburg, or Normandy

Science

• report science experiments

Math

• first student to solve problem
• students challenge each other
• daily math fluency

Foreign Language

• discussions in foreign language
• teach phrases
• outreach to ELL

Film/TV Study

• Students watch films/programs looking for specific instances of ex irony, symblism etc. they can tweet as the recognize occurences inwhat they watch

Sports

• tweet during sports event - reporting
• pictures can be included in tweets
• create a sports network within school

Lots of ideas!

Photo Credit:
"Meet Mr. Twitters"
Roz Chast
The New Yorker, 8.31.09
The CartoonBank