Twitter is a powerful social media tool that can enable learning. This powerful communication tool can build community and also open the door to greater knowledge, a richer learning experience and enhance a culture in a school of SHARING.
Communicate with ICT: using ICT to communicate ideas and information with others adhering to social protocols appropriate to the communicative context (purpose, audience and technology)
· share, exchange and collaborate to enhance learning by:
· sharing information, such as on social networking sites
· exchanging information through reciprocal communication, such as by email, instant messaging, bulletin boards, online friends, public forums, blogs, video conferencing
· collaborating and collectively contributing to a product, such as using wiki project management tools, file management, online docs, interactive whiteboard software
Understand and apply social protocols to:
· receive, send and publish taking into account characteristics of users, such as culture, gender, location, status, and expertise, and the permanence of digital histories
What is Twitter? It is 140 characters micro blogging social media site. Social Media is content that has been created by its audience. To use social media successfully you create conversations, conversations create communities.
Some Classroom Ideas
- Gather real-world data
- Notice Board- Notify students of changes to course content, schedules, venues or other important information.
- Summaries- Ask students to read an article or chapter and then post their brief summary or précis of the key point(s). A limit of 140 characters demands a lot of academic discipline.
- Share a hyperlink – a directed task for students – each is required to regularly share one new hyperlink to a useful site they have found.
- Follow a famous person and document their progress. Better still if this can be linked to an event
- Choose a famous person from the past and create a twitter account for them – choose an image which represents the historical figure and over a period of time write regular tweets in the role of that character, in a style and using the vocabulary you think they would have used (e.g. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar).
- Hold discussions -All students participate because a sequence of contributors is agreed beforehand.
- Progressive collaborative writing - Students agree to take it in turns to contribute to an account or ‘story’ over a period of time.
- Give it a standard story opener and tweet this to your network
- Ask network to continue the story in tweets, collaborating with the previous tweets and following them.
- Any topic that has an open question to ask
- Let parents follow what you are up to
- Put up a tweet asking people to give you their location. Class first estimate distance from school, then use an atlas to gauge distance. Then using Google Earth - can place mark where they are and find out distances.
- Give children individually the twitter 140 characters rule - they have to write story introduction, character description or whole story.
- Use a twitter poll to collect and graph opinions about a controversial issue- http://www.twtpoll.com/
- Word Morph - send out a word and have your network give the students synonym and other meanings, thereby testing the literacy strength of your PLN. Or have classrooms connect during writing workshops.
- Find someone in another class, school, country who is interested in the same topic you are. Following each other on Twitter, share information, resources and ideas.
- After a study of point of view and character development
- Model writing questions, summaries or response
- Use to help with inquiry questions in classroom, opening up your room to a wider audience
- Scavenger Hunt- Have students find websites, pictures, or other online documents that fit a certain criteria related to your subject area.
- Reflection or Notetaking- Students can take their notes during a class in the backchannel, or share reflections.
- Sharing Resources- Students can also look online for information that supplements the lecture or class discussion.
- Commenting-Students can also comment on the ideas being share or discussed in class.
- Amplifying Ideas
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