Twitter in the classroom

[Ben Paulson]

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm a Twitter newbie. (follow me here!) I'm officially a convert. Two main reasons I'm digging it :

1. Twitter is like Google Reader only the content is selected by actual human beings instead of robots serving the will of XML code.
2. It's a two-way conversation. Ask questions and you get answers. Well not me personally, but a guy I know...I think my 23 followers is a little short of the "critical mass" needed to really take advantage, but you can imagine what it'd be like, right?

I also like the idea of boiling an idea down to 140 characters. It's work. And it really makes you decide on what's important. This is a valuable skill, and one that I want my students practicing in class.

In my school last year I facilitated a PLC focused on the topic "Brain Research Applied to Education," and we used John Medina's fantastic book Brain Rules as a jumping off point for discussions. One of the "rules" from the book is "repeat to remember." The rule is humorously explained by Medina himself in this video...

The implication for the classroom is obvious. I've got 80 minute blocks, so the last few minutes of class is ideal. Last year I experimented a bit with a few different review strategies but this year I'm giving Twitter a go. I've created a Twitter id (you can follow our daily class tweets starting August 9th here) and we'll take a couple minutes to generate a tweet or tweets to summarize the "big idea" of the day.

I think there's lots to play around with here, for instance maybe I assign the task to one person at the start of class, randomly call on someone, or we do it as a class. Students with Twitter accounts could follow the tweets and the history of tweets could serve as a quick review. Still a work in progress...

Oh, and if you've got a minute, stop by my blog Science(us)