Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Twitter for Educators Reflection

Since starting this Masters in Educational Technology, I have heard tons about Twitter.  Through research, I am finding that it can be another PLN for educators.  Social media is an excellent tool for educating our students.  I just created both my Twitter and TweetDeck account yesterday.  Earlier this evening, I just completed my first tweet.  I found two links that are for those just getting started like my self.  They are  50+ Ways to Use Twitter in Your Classroom  and  100 Ways to Use Twitter in Education, By Degree of Difficulty.  I just saw on Twitter this evening through a friend's tweet, that this is a great tool to teach visual literacy in the 21st Century Classroom. Anything involving literacy excites me since I am an ELA Teacher.  I had to be what my husband calls a "stalker" on Facebook for awhile and it looks like I am going to be one on Twitter until I can see how it all works.  Thanks in advance to my fellow classmates for their patience as I start this next journey.  Below are examples that I found of how Twitter could benefit an educator in an ELA classroom.  

  • Free information 
  • Short conversations 24/7
  • A way to connect with other teachers
  • Collaborate on education chats
  • Find tools, strategies, and resources
  • Communicate with parents or students
  • Research and find answers 
  • Send out reminders to students or parents
  • Allow students to give feed back on a book or video
  • Allow students to answer questions or have discussions
  • Give students who don't really say much in class, a way to communicate because some will say more on line
  • Have students tweet sentences to build vocabulary, improve writing, and punctuation which would make students accountable for grammar
There are tons more than what I mentioned and I am not quite sure which direction I will go with these in my 2nd Grade ELA classroom.  This might be a good topic to bring up with my students.  We are starting a Service Learning Project for our new Tiger's Den at the elementary.  Some valuable tweeting might happen in the future with this project.  

Next week, we will start a Twitter chat assignment in this course.  My next goal is to figure out hashtags. A link that I found that could be helpful is The Complete Guide to Twitter Hashtags for Education.  

What are you doing with Twitter in your classroom?  I would love to hear your ideas.  

@BonnieJohn6


3 comments:

  1. Here is a link that you might find helpful to get you started with using Twitter and a few ideas for your class of very young kiddos.

    https://docs.google.com/a/stjschools.org/presentation/d/1K0y4vIDtDEpJiNBq2lWpOUQQydHZac1VmTcOvkIwLrY/embed?hl=en&size=s#slide=id.p

    Like you I am hoping to find some fun and educational ways that I can incorporate Twitter into my elementary classroom.

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  2. Bonnie,

    I found you on Twitter and am following you! Please follow me too: @doyel79. I clicked on your link, 50+ ways to use Twitter in the Classroom. The information was useful such as using Twitter as a bulletin board to keep classroom projects organized or as a means to coordinate assignments rather than using email. I cannot wait to become more familiar with Tweeting and incorporate these tools into my classroom. I know Twitter is already popular with my students so using these for classroom projects will already be familiar to them. Thanks for the links! Look forward to following your tweets :)

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  3. Great ideas there! And a great list to look back on through this class!

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