Twitter for the Classroom {Part 3}

If you've been following my Twitter in the Classroom series, you know it's time for {Part 3}! (Catch up {Part 1} and {Part 2} here, if you need to!)

Here are our {Part 3} discussion topics, if you're ready:

• Tweet Suggestions (For Teachers)
• Twitter Projects/Activities (For Students)

Tweet Suggestions (For Teachers)

Here are some suggestions for things you can tweet to your student/parent audience:

1. Reminders about assignments that are due or upcoming quizzes/exams/projects. 
2. Reminders about snow days, picture days, sporting events, field trips, spirit days, etc. 
3. School events and/or their outcomes (plays, musicals, art shows, academic meets, etc.) -- especially ones where your school won/did well or is playing a rival!
4. Hints about how to complete an assignment or project.
5. Bonus points that can only be aquired through Twitter. (I've tweeted, "Go to the class website and scroll to the bottom of the page. The first student to describe to me the newest object at the bottom of that page gets 5 bonus points." The purpose of this, of course, was to get students to view the class website and the newest important tool on it!)
6. Helpful websites that could assist them academically (StarFall, CliffNotes, Online Calculator, etc.)
7. Apple/Blackberry, Android apps they might find helpful. (I recently tweeted about Flashcards+ and Sundry Notes!)
8. Books you recommend (I always have some students who have a hard time finding something interesting to read. I read books from my classroom library and tweet short blurbs to interest students in the book!)
9. Vocabulary words/definitions in a Word of the Day (#WOTD) format.
10. A poll to help your classroom/planned lessons (I recommend using Twtpoll!)
11. Exit ticket answers. (If students ask a question on an exit ticket, you could answer it on Twitter. This allows everyone to benefit from the answers without taking up any class time. Afterwards, you could copy/paste the updates and post the dialogue on your classroom website so those that couldn't access Twitter at the time can still get the knowledge. (For instance, I did exit tickets after an introductory lesson about courtroom trials, since my students would be conducting a trial about the characters in a book we'd just read. Some students were still confused on the process of the courtroom, and I gave them a chance to anonymously ask any question they still had. I answered these questions on Twitter, and it was a hit!
12. Motivational/inspirational quotes

Twitter Projects/Activities (For Students)

For all of these activities, there are a couple of ways you, the teacher, can keep track of students' answers and assess, if need be.

1. The main way is to create a hashtag just for your class. For instance, I might specify #MrsKEng1 for my 1st hour English class. From that point forward, if I wanted to find my students' tweets, I just type #MrsKEng1 in the search bar and read away! (Certain Twitter apps allow you to save search terms for quick retrieval. Just something to check into!)
2. Another option is to create student lists. You can create a list for all of your students, and then divide them by class and/or subject. When you want to read their tweets, just click on the name of the list on your right sidebar. 
3. Ask students to "mention" you in every single classroom-related tweet. 

With that in mind, here are some projects/activities I've thought of that use Twitter in the Classroom:

1. Schedule a chat. For instance, I might specify the #MrsKEng1 hashtag and assign a start time of  7 pm. Ideally, at 7 pm, students would log on and use the search box to find our class's hashtag. We can then have an online discussion of classroom topics outside the walls of our classroom. Whether you make this an actual assignment or an extra credit activity is, of course, up to you. You could discuss anything from an in-class topic to a President's speech on television to a movie you all went to see!
2. Peer-to-peer tutoring. Encourage parents/students to tweet questions. Other students/parents could check the hashtag and answer peer's questions. We learn best when we teach! I'd definitely suggest monitoring this activity to ensure that all questions are answered accurately.
3. Exit ticket. At the end of class, ask students to whip out their cell phones and tweet a quick exit comment/question to the cyber-world. Hopefully, these tweets generate a discussion or other students answering their peers' questions. (Of course, you would want to make sure all students had access to texting before you proceeded with this experiment. I've heard that you can use Google functions to text, but I haven't tested it yet.) You also get a quick evaluation of who understands the material.
4. Summary of the day. Whether you've just taught a math lesson or you've just finished another chapter in the class novel, students can tweet a 140-character summary of the day's lesson. In order to make assessment easier, you might consider having students either tweet this as a "reply" or include the class hashtag. (Just so you know, both options lessen the number of allowed characters/tweet.) Students could "re-teach" the jist of today's lesson. 
5. Short answer quiz questions. Of course, <140-characters/tweet is a short short answer! But if you're able to explain/answers something in such a short and concise manner, you're probably more likely to understand it.
6. Twitter as bellwork. This feeds off the last suggestion, but immediately upon entering the room, there will be questions or a discussion prompt on the board (or tweeted by you). Students must respond to the question(s)/discussion prompt while you take care of those mundane "house-keeping" duties (attendance, lunch count, etc).
7. Summary of text. After reading a chapter in a novel or expository textbook, ask students to tweet  summary of what they just read. 
8. Timeline report. Follow a celebrity or company and track their tweets over time. Then write a report over their day-to-day life. This could work as a biography project or even for a business class. 
9. Find students in another school/state/country with whom your students can tweet back and forth. It would be challenging to convey all information in 140-character segments, but that might create more concise writers. 
10. Create a class story. One student can start by tweeting the beginning line to a story. Students then take turns to tweet a class story, one line at a time. This collaborative project works on writing skills, creativity, and sharing.
11. Getting to know you. As a back to school activity, ask students to describe themselves in 160-characters or less. If students' Twitter usernames weren't easily recognizable, you could even play a game where students must guess which student belongs with which tweet!
12. Character tweet. After reading a novel, students can pick a character from the story and tweet, say, 5 status updates throughout the day. Each status update should be written in the 1st person format, as if the student were actually the character. 
13. Historical tweet. Feeding off the previous suggestion, you could ask students to pick a person from history and impersonate them on Twitter throughout the day. What would Abe Lincoln have to say if Twitter was available during his time? A website called Historical Tweets might help with this!
14. Hashtag timeline. Monitor the hashtags over a period of time to see the trends of our society. This would be great for a history or current events class. 
15. Hashtag quick write. On a random day, write the current trending topics on the board. Ask students to write about a curtain hashtag either individually or as a group. They could write their thoughts, create a story, etc.
16. Personal story. Using the 3 parts of a story, ask students to write an entire story in 420-characters or less (140 for the beginning, 140 for the middle, and 140 for the end). 
17. Micro-research paper. Ask students to create a micro-research paper using the Twitter guidelines. The intro paragraph must be 140-characters, the thesis must be 140-characters, the first paragraph.... you get the idea. Each part of the micro-paper must comply with Twitter character count rules. 
18. Spelling race. Tell students a word in class and see who can tweet the correct spelling the most quickly. (You could also do this for math problems, science/history trivia questions, etc.)
19. Vocab race. Tweet a word and see who can reply with the correct definition the most quickly...or vice versa.
20. Vocab sentences. Tweet a word and ask students to reply with a tweet that uses that vocab word correctly in a sentence. 
21. Synonym game. Call out a word and ask students to tweet synonyms.
22. Book club. Students tweet book blurbs in an effort to get other kids to read great books.
23. Attendance. Some days, give yourself a break from taking attendance and do it on Twitter. My suggestions: use the bellwork response tweets as a way to take attendance. You may still need to double-check this one because of two main reasons: 1) present students could text the bellwork question to an absent classmate, who would then tweet the bellwork in a timely manner. 2) Present students who don't participate would be counted absent. :-/

 I'm all tapped out of ideas for now. What suggestions do you guys have? 


Continue: Twitter for the Classroom {Part 4}