How "tweet" it is to be loved by you...Using Twitter in the classroom

The Twitter community is something that I am new to. I have heard a lot about Twitter, I know there are something called "tweets" and that people can follow one another on this network. However, prior to starting this Mod, I never had any idea of how this site could function in a classroom. Some of the websites I visited: "How to use Twitter for Social Learning" and "The What, Why and How of Twitter" both helped to clarify this for me. In the first article, I thought that learning about "Micro-learning" was extremely interesting, I honestly had not heard of this before I read the section of this article called "Micro-learning on Twitter." I thought that this article presented a really neat idea. A teacher could use twitter to create "micro lessons", which would have to be a lesson presented in less than 140 characters, the lenght of a tweet. This was interesting to me because these lessons have to contain links to videos, audio clips, hyperlinks, etc. in order to help students create real meaning in a lesson. This would be a great tool for a classroom because the students could learn so much via this multimedia lesson instead of the traditional, boring, textbook reading and lecture style class. "The What, Why and How of Twitter" was a neat website to check out because the author of the presentation, Jenny Luca, highlighted some of the other uses of Twitter, such as the social aspect and the ability to share all kinds of information quickly. When using Twitter, students can "debate" over their tweets, check out the newest trends and what people are "talking about" and can also share links with their classmates to help them with research or any other important topics that relate to school or their social life. Like a blog, students can use Twitter to follow one another and form a strong classroom community. I think that for all of these reasons, Twitter can be a very useful tool in the classroom and I think students will really enjoy being able to connect to their classmates in this new way.

What I've Been Fed...

I have found the RSS feed to be a very useful and interesting tool. I never knew that they existed prior to taking this course, and I can see now why they are very popular. I signed up for six different websites and within seconds, I had 218 new posts to read and look at, most of which provide useful information for those in the field of education. From the posts that I have shared with the class, I want to highlight the post titled "Site of the Week" from the edublog 4teachers.org. This post is not lengthy or complicated, but it suggests a website for teachers to use and explains the site a little bit. This post highlights the Teachersfirst website, which seems like another interesting tool to use. It is a site for teachers to organize all online databases and resources, including blogs, wikis, lesson plans, etc, all in one spot. I thought this could be useful for the rest of the class because this website may be one to help us organize all of the interesting sites we are viewing and using for this class. It can help teachers to keep all of these online resources together and stay organized!



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