Introducing Twitter!

Introduced my high school students to Twitter today. Interestingly enough, none had heard of it. Here's what I did. At the start of the hour I went over what our learning goals were for the hour (to create/record introductions for their podcast using established recording stations). I told them we would start in just a minute -- hold that thought. Quickly, I then took them to Twitter.com. I created an account/username - for example, let's say I used pd6. Then I had students create an account using "pd6" and then their first names only (example - pd6jane). I had them "follow me", but the cool thing was, when they looked me up to "follow me" as pd6, it brought up everyone who had pd6 at the start of his/her user name! The kids then followed every other user from our class -- the list was right there ready to go! This allowed us to quickly set up a twitter group. I started informally by asking them to give a "tweet" about one great thing that happened over Thanksgiving break, and one not so good thing. Next, I asked them to post a "tweet" about what they really wanted for "Christmas. I had them refresh to see what others responded with. By this point, all the kids seemed to get what Twitter was all about and we discussed how you could use this tool, stressing that it really didn't have to be a place for posting the mundane minute by minute account of one's life. Then, I told them their third tweet. I told them this one would be more "academic". I said, "send a tweet explaining what our major learning goal is for class today as I explained at the start of class". This was great -- it gave me immediate feedback as to if they had even got the objective when I presented it. I had them refresh their screens and see if their personal answer was similar to other classmates (instant feedback for them). Thought tomorrow I'd like to use Twitter as a "clicker" system, of sorts - ask a question as review, tell them to tweet their responses, and get a feel for what kind of retention/learning is happening. :)