Check out THIS argument on Twitter usage in classroom....
I am intrigued by Twitter and even during Parent/Teacher conferences I had a parent ask me if I was going to implement Twitter in my classroom, how progressive!
1) It scares me
2) It intrigues me
3) I find myself enthralled in it for social networking reasons.
Is it because the#hastags allow for tagging and categorization of subject matter or is it because I know that Hemingway would be completely in love because of the short sentence structure that Twitter encourages. However, are short sentences always better? Can we really say that we would rather have students write in a concise manner? What if that is hard for them?
Twitter, like anything else, has a time and place with the right group of students. I would be interested in how Twitter is used (if at all) in the college classroom. I feel as though many college professors in education (like the former professor from Millersville that shared this link, are progressive in their thinking and excited about the use of new technology; even those technologies that are on the faux-paus list because of their connotations with social media.
The raw data in this article is also interesting; posing the question that social media is improving the thought-processes that students use when writing. There were even some nuances that reading levels didn't effect a child's intelligence. This interested me.....
So no more reading? Tweeting? The information and micro-chipping age is a difficult one to ignore. Just a few weeks ago a vet asked me about microchipping my horse in case of theft. We put our stamps and labels on everything to categorize it as "ours," so why not do the same with our writing by tagging it with #hashtags?
Can we implement Twitter without students having access to information, pictures, and profiles that are too "adult," and can we explicitly control their usage of this tool? Better question, should we?
I think I like the idea of having students truncate their thoughts to 140 characters...not all the time, of course, but there is definitely learning there. For example, I've used a hashtag assignment where they have to symbolize a piece of literature. (They made valentine tweets to and from characters who were involved in a love triangle in The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Sherlock Holmes novel. I saw some cool ones, like #meetmeonthemoor and #avoidthehound) It's a fun way to really get to the main idea and theme and they already do it all the time. Funny that you mention..I actually often have students asking me if I'm on twitter and if could create a teacher account to post homework. (Response: I had one when I was teaching middle school, but I've been hesitant with high school annnnnnd I can't really pinpoint as to why....interesting.)
ReplyDeleteLike Lesley, I've used the concept of Twitter in the classroom without having to ever touch the technology. When my students were struggling to keep up with Romeo and Juliet, we created a "Twitter feed" (on a worksheet frame I made) to modernize the language of the characters and help to sequence who said what. My school is a residential school and students' access to social media is pretty limited, so it would be difficult to incorporate the real Twitter into my instruction. However, I think there could be value in using it, and I'm interested in what you decide to do!
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