Investigating Twitter and putting a tentative foot in the water.
I use technology widely yet I am not inclined to add any more volume to the already amassed volume of useless information floating around about matters that I have no interest in. I enjoy keeping an uncluttered head! I enjoy the outside world and being active away from a device or screen. I prefer my communications to be deliberate and purposeful. But, I may be about to discover something worthwhile.
As an educator of primary age student I am exploring what could fit where in my teaching with this young age group. Twitter is new to me. I know of it but have not thought of it in an educational context. Twitter states its mission as being, “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” There are a few users – 271 million active users in a world of more than 7 billion people.
As a non Twitter user, I notice it is similar to Facebook. You get a feed of snippets of information from advertisers, promotion, news bits etc. How many news feeds do I want to keep up with? What will be purposeful to teaching and learning with my students?
G’day Tina,
Great to see you thinking about using Twitter. When I first joined in 2008, I found no use for it at all. But then I wanted my students to receive comments from other students around the world.
How could they do that when they knew no-one outside their family sphere? Answer: I tweet about it and find some like minded teachers with students who would comment. Thus began the student blogging challenge, which some of your students are taking part in this year.
I notice there are some classes now who have their own twitter account and they send out tweets to other classes they follow mentioning posts they have written or asking questions for surveying their followers. You could follow @56CSMBPS @2ndClassR6
A few great hashtags or followers are #comments4kids #14stubc (blogging challenge for this year) @edutweetoz #aussieEd #ozprimschchat #whatisschool
If you go to my profile @tasteach you will find I have lists of teachers I follow from each state of Australia and for a different variety of reasons. My Twitter feed is virtually educational only – no celebs etc
A reply on my blog! That was exciting. Your information about how the Student Challenge started and using Twitter to support linking students to others out of their patch really prompted some new thinking for me. Thanks