I've been on twitter a while now, mainly to connect with other bloggers, teachers and causes that are important to me (and of course, funny stuff and Harry Potter humor).
Recently, my school division has been on a big twitter kick---all the schools are now tweeting. And, my school was the only one who wasn't (GASP!). So over break, the technology teacher and I met and created facebook and twitter (@alesbuzzybees) accounts for our school. We will now be tweeting positive things that happened at the school, photos, reminders, and about closings and delays.
Then I got to thinking, wouldn't it be fun to have an account for Luna? And totally not crazy at all. To keep it from being crazy, I decided to have my students "translate" for Luna and tweet in her voice. This way, they are learning about intended audience, voice and author's purpose (without having to do stupid worksheets). You can follow us at @LunaReaderDog .
We are also using twitter to learn about grammar and spelling mistakes. They LOVE it! We've been using celebrity tweets. Some comments I've gotten from the kiddos about it, are things like, "wow, they make mistakes like we do." (and of course, "wow, I'm smarter than ----so and so---! They don't know how to ------ right!" I wanted to test it out before I got too in depth, so I did a search on Teachers Pay Teachers. There is some great stuff on there (especially free---anything from logos, to letters to parents, to teaching characterization by using twitter), but for now, like I said, I just wanted grammar practice.
This is the one I downloaded by Caroline Sallen.
But, I'm wondering, how do you use twitter in your classroom and school?
Some teachers use it for class "discussions." They tweet a question and then the kids answer, and respond to each other's answers -- all projected on the screen in the classroom. Some kids won't raise their hand to answer a question, but they'll tweet!
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