Twitter has grown enormously since it made it's debut in 2006. I can remember teaching my Dad how to tweet as he covers local sports for several surrounding high schools. He had a flip phone and in order to tweet scores for Friday night games, he would have to send a text to a code number in order to get it show up on the Twitter feed. As a matter of fact, one of my first tweets was about teaching him to tweet. Times have changed, Twitter has evolved. More importantly, my use and knowledge of how to use this social networking platform for educational purposes has also evolved.
In the past I have used Tall Tweets for Twitter. I coach tennis at the high school level. In our area students mainly use Twitter and Snapchat to communicate. Knowing this is how they prefer to communicate, I created a Twitter account explicitly to push information to and about my team. They loved to be tweeted about with scores and other recognition. Some of my tennis tweets were long, hence the need for Tall Tweets. Tall Tweets allows for more than the normal 140 characters per tweet.
I also use Tweet Deck. Tweet Deck allows me to go back and look at the tweets I have hearted on my feed. Especially if I heart them while not at my desk or when I am multi-tasking. For example, I had to wait in a doctors office, I checked my feed, saw interesting ideas that I didn't know anything about, didn't have time to read in depth at the moment, I hearted them. Later, in the week I go back and look at my weekly activity, delve deeper and decide if this is something I want to know more about. It basically is a way that I can bookmark interesting things for my continued learning and teaching experiences.
Also, to aide with coaching duties I used Buffer. Buffer allows you to send out timed tweets. I try to tweet when I know my kids will likely be able to see the information I push out. Timing my tweets helped with that tremendously. There are many different apps or sites that allow you to time or schedule your tweets.
This week I have been so involved with digging deeper into the depths of Twitter land that I have found I was almost late with a few of my assignments. EEK, addiction possibly? Maybe so! Anyhow, being addicted to learning and continuing our own development can't be all that bad.
Using Twitter in the classroom is something I will definitely do mofe. After reading and thinking about my classes, it would be so easy to push out reminders or thought provoking questions via Twitter. It's the platform of choice for the kids that find their way into my room each day. Why wouldn't I want to meet them on their own playground? Last year I hosted a Twitter challenge on our campus where I posted a giant bingo card on the wall by my door. All students were invited to play even if I didn't have them in my class. There were challenges such as "tweet a pic of you with our campus Librarian". This pushed the kids to get to the librarian, meet her, have small talk and ask for a picture with her. There entire board was filled with activities like that. It will be good to use again as an icebreaker at the first of the year with a few new fresh entries of course. I will continue to find ways to connect kids to my classroom while incorporating learning, using Twitter. Who doesn't want to learn and have fun doing it?
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