Thing 03: Twitter

I've used Twitter for personal reasons for a long time.  I'm a fan of the concise nature, the ability to crowd source ideas, and receive instant information.  One of the most interesting things I've noticed is how Twitter is often 1-2 days ahead of everywhere else.  See something trending on Twitter?  It'll be in the news a day or two later.

Twitter can also be the source of a lot of inspiration.  I'm still much more of a "lurker" than a producer of content - though that is less about discomfort than privacy issues (I'll touch on that a bit later).  Lurking, however, can be a way of broadening ideas.  Interested in Education? Game industry? Politics? Science and nature?  There are people on twitter that will challenge you, keep you informed on the most recent developments and news, post pictures, graphs, links, that will help deepen your understanding and desire.  It's a great habit to be able to look through hashtags for national conferences even if you are unable to go, since you can still benefit a lot from the thought collective.

Due to social media restrictions, I have not been able to utilize that aspect of twitter in my classroom.  However, I have found creative ways to bring in the other positive aspect: concision.  One of the parts that makes Twitter such a good source for inspiration is that every character counts.

This can be a great technique for scholars to understand that more is not always better.  In my Hamlet unit, I introduce the characters and setting using tweets from their perspectives.  It helps scholars identify with the characters.  It also serves to introduce the importance of being concise.  Throughout the unit, I ask scholars to respond in tweets - sometimes from their own perspectives, sometimes from the perspectives of characters.

I'd love to integrate technology more into this.  I wonder if we could find a way to create accounts for each character, that scholars could only access from the classroom.  It'd be an interesting way to help students review or stay caught up if they missed class - to just scroll through the timeline.  I'd be even cooler to assign students to respond to questions from the perspective of each character.  Though that might be wishful thinking!