Twitter in the Classroom

As part of our thinwalls collaboration, we are getting ready to begin using twitter in our classrooms.

All of the kids in each classroom have been reading the book The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and posting responses on their blogs every two chapters. As well, we have been taking this time to try to teach commenting skills to the students and asking them to write more comments as part of this process.

The time is drawing near for us to complete the novel and head into a final project. We have decided to draw out the themes of this novel (youth and family violence, friendship, heroism, etc.) and ask the students what topics they are interested in working with and what they would like to do for a form of representation. This is similar to the International Teen Life project from last school year. The groups they are designing will have students from both Snow Lake and Los Angeles in them and planning will take centre stage for some time as students make decisions about what they would like to do. We will approve their plans or send them back for clarification or change, but one requirement of their final project is that their representation will have to be accessible by all students in both classes. We have decided that this will leave us wide open enough to allow the students freedom with their learning and the tools, but will require high level collaboration and networking skills.

In comes twitter.

All of the students in both classes have iGoogle accounts so we have been thinking about getting each of them to sign up for twitter accounts and simply pull the RSS feeds of those people in their network (five? six? kids working on the same topic) into their iGoogle homepagest. This would allow them to stay in touch with each other and also give them a tool to ask questions of those who they are working with, post suggestions, share resources, etc. But now I am worrying about the effect of being in a network with only a few other people. As those of us who are heavy twitter users can attest to, a small network often gives small benefits and does not achieve critical mass easily. Five or six kids working together and using twitter as a communication device will be closely connected and able to see what each other is doing, but it will not allow others who may not be in their group to contribute resources, help when trouble arises, or drive forward the conversation. But the 54 kids total we have involved in this collaboration are certainly enough to be a network.

This will all still need to be "OK'd" by my teaching partners in LA, but I believe that if we get all of the students and teachers who are involved in this collaboration into twitter, and get them following each other, we will produce a stream of thought that will be beneficial to their learning. It will have to be monitored as does any tool that we use with students. I am worried about the "signal vs. noise" ratio that may emerge, but I also know that my own network is sometimes used for serious learning, and other times to cajole, laugh, and make general contact with each other. We are human. That is our reality. Their network will be the same. I wish their was a way to subscribe to this feed to allow it be archived and categorized by user. This would give us much more data in the end.

Another experiment in collaboration and networking across several thousand kilometres.

Tags: twitter, classroom, thinwalls, collaboration, networking

Comments

[Chris Betcher]

G'day Clarence, I read this with great interest, looking for cool ways to use Twitter in a classroom setting. I even grabbed an RSS feed from my own Twitter page and added it to an aggregator (I used Netvibes rather than iGoogle)

I'm just trying to work out though, why is it better to do it this way than to use just a plain old discussion forum? I'm looking at how these feeds all come to the one place and trying to get my head around the functional difference between this and a forum. Am I missing something?

Chris

[Christopher Watson]

Clarence, At my school teachers in the English department have had students blogging since last year. The scope of the students blogs ranges from a place to post homework assignments, reading response journal, commonplace book, and as a 'blog.' As a technology resource teacher, I have only one class, and it's not a problem to keep track and moderate my student bloggers. But monitoring content is always a concern of other teachers I work with. I can see Twitter as a powerful tool for students (I use it and will probably introduce it to my class at some point this year). But how are you dealing with the logistics of so many blogs and tweets? Or, maybe a better question is what is your school's philosophy when it comes to monitoring the content?
Thanks for the post, CW

[mrmayo]

It's amazing how many different tools you have been able to effectively use this year with your students. How in the world do you keep up with all the various usernames, log-ins, and rules for each new tool you introduce? From what I understand you are using wiki's, blogs, IM, twitter, skype, iGoogle, voicethread, RSS, and ...

Part of using all these tools is having students figure out how they work. You had a very interesting post a month or so ago about the complexities of the typical weblog. Is figuring each new tool out part of the learning in your classroom? It's almost like there are two simultaneous parts: 1. the project itself- the work and communication. 2. reading and problem solving- figuring out the tools.

What's next? Space travel :) George

[Carolyn Foote]

Clarence,

I'll be interested to hear how this works out.

I've been wishing twitter had the ability to set up different networks, actually--so for example, you could have a network with all your students in it, but also have other networks.

Our robotics teacher has just set up a twitter feed for our new robotics team, and has set up the ability for students to "jott" to their twitter as well.
The plan is that robotics students between the two class periods can use twitter to communicate with each other and keep up with the progress of their projects, which seems to me an excellent use of the tool.

Thanks for sharing the process.
Carolyn

[susan funk]

Twitter? cool. Outsiders? Oh no. I hope you are talking about the context and the racism. Good novel and students seem to still love it but it needs so much talk and I believe is best done in tandem with something more up to date and less 'white boy'. Touching Spirit Bear comes to mind, I've been looking for others. Keep up the cool stuff, find a new novel.

[Clarence Fisher]

Thanks for all of the comments on this. They always help me to flesh out the ideas a bit more. Now to hopefully answer a few questions:

Chris: I think Twitter is different from a forum simply because it is so simple and so focused. 140 characters is not a lot of space. It makes us focus on the single piece of communication we want to get across to those who are reading. It also has an ease of use factor that is simply unbelievable: type, press update. It completely gets us away from tech skills and onto literacy.

Christopher: As I mentioned in the post, I expect signal vs. noise to be one issue that does need monitoring with Twitter simply because it is so easy to use it can be easily abused. In our district we simply believe in monitoring kids and teaching them to be good online citizens. For example, (you might be shocked to hear) we have absolutely no filters on our net service. Not that we want to tempt kids, we just want to teach them instead of filter them. We do have a strict IUP which we follow closely and which we hold kids accountable to. If they mess up, they lose computer privileges, parents are contacted, more serious consequences are possible is needed.

George: The rocket is coming up in a shed...

Carolyn: Cool.

Susan: I have to say that I don't agree with you. I do agree that The Outsiders requires discussions and handling, but it is completely where the kids are. It gives us a window in to discussions about teen and family violence, about friendship, about heroism and survival, about loss, and many other topics that are not easy to convince teenagers to take seriously and work with. I completely enjoy this book.