Journal #5: Twitter

Twitter in the Classroom

With so much social media going on, I was reluctant to create a Twitter account.  It is just another account I have to keep up with and my thoughts were that it was just a place for people to follow celebrities.When I signed up, it asked me to choose so many different people to follow.  Naturally, I did and have not seen myself amused by much of what any of them had to say.  It wasn't until I read the 35 interesting ways to use Twitter in the classroom that I could see possibilities.

Scavenger Hunt was one of the first ideas that caught my attention.  My first graders will be creating ebook animal reports towards to end of the year and this can be another resource in which they can gather information about their animal and habitat to add to their research.  They will have fun locating their animal on a map too and see all the different places their animal lives.

Communicating with Experts seemed like an interesting and fun idea.  My students have a lot of good questions that they probably would find more exciting having it come from an expert in that field.  Here I can even ask my students' parents to be "our experts" since their occupations are quite diverse.  This way, my parents can feel like they are connected with the class as well if they are unable to physically come in and volunteer.

The home and school connection is really important in my district and I can see myself using Twitter Badges to update my classroom website and have students tweet about what they've learned about a certain topic as well to help with the class discussions as well as help to inform parents since kids don't really talk about their day much anymore.

There are many concerns I have with privacy issues and parents and students abusing this type of social media in the school setting.  It is sometimes difficult to draw the line between social media with friends and social media in education.  Since Twitter is so popular in social media, the norms may be lost when using it for education and can cause more of a problem than what is worth.