I should have started blogging about #eblock when I started using twitter in the classroom, but truthfully it started out as an experiment. I didn't realize it would gain the momentum it did!
The very reason I got on to Twitter, in fact, was to use it with my classes. Last December, I walked into one of my English 12 classes (E Block) and said,
"Listen, I want to try something different with you. I don't know how it's going to work, but let's get to using it together..."
At first, I used Twitter as a medium for students to complete exit slips. I'd ask things like: What did you think of Hamlet's reaction? or How are you finding the language of the text? Students were already accustomed to responding using pen & paper and by posting to my blog, so I didn't actually think that tweeting their responses would be any different. The first few tweets from students were quite simple - there is a 140 character count, after all - and quite frankly, vulgar (from an English teacher's perspective, anyway.) I started to worry that I was perpetuating lazy text-style conversations.
What started happening, though, really amazed me. Since students could see each other's immediate responses, they started policing each other. They would say things like, "Dude, you know everyone can see your tweet, right?" "This is Senior English, I'm sure there's a more correct way to say that..." I started to realize that my students had to think about their tweets; they had to be more concise (and precise) with how they expressed their thoughts; they were becoming more and more aware of audience. We started using Twitter regularly: as exit slips, as back-channel opportunities to respond (I used Twitterfall to project tweets during discussion)... We even composed twitter poetry.
It was also interesting that my students developed very strong opinions of how others represented themselves online. We discussed digital citizenship alongside literary texts and the consequences of producing a "forever text". In fact, one of my students walked into class one day after seeing the youtube video of the UCLA student ranting about Asian students and said, "She did not leave a very good digital footprint, did she?" What more could I say of the learning that was happening?
There will always be naysayers when it comes to twitter, but I have to remind myself that even if it is a fad, our students still have to live in that fad-world. I'd better darn well teach them how to use it in creative and constructive ways! In the end, what my students and I realized was that twitter (and social media in general) has the power to inform, reform, and transform learning... if we actually practise using it!
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