Brand New #studentweet by @MrRiedl

I have discovered the beauty of Twitter over the summer! Over the past few months, I have been exploring what Twitter chats are, and why #edchat is such a big deal. Educators have a very large presence on Twitter. They use it for professional development, support, sharing ideas, networking, and more. From what I understand, it all started with a few teachers chatting back and forth on Twitter with the #edchat hash tag, discussing education. It grew an audience from there, and now there are hundreds of different hash tags for unique weekly chats that educators can participate in. I have received many ideas from other teachers over the summer as I have developed a professional learning network (PLN) which includes teachers, administrators, and parents.

One idea I plan to implement is to integrate Twitter into student writing this school year. At the end of each day, I will review with the students what they learned that day in the form of a tweet. On certain days, I will give the students specific writing challenges to use in their tweets, such as identifying an adverb in their sentence, including prepositional phrases, using spelling words, and more. The purpose is to challenge them with their learning, writing, and communicating in a fun way. I plan to post one student tweet each day to my @MrRiedl Twitter account, with the hash tag #studentweet to identify these as 100% student written, along with the student author's initials as well. For those parents without Twitter accounts, I will compile the previous week's #studentweet entries onto the weekly newsletter for parents to read!

I am most excited about Open House on Tuesday. My plan is to compile one word from each student that describes how they feel about starting school on Wednesday. I will put all of them together into one tweet that night, and hopefully it'll be an interesting look into 5th grade anticipation! We'll see how the year goes, one day and one tweet at a time.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter: @MrRiedl will have all #studentweet updates as well as classroom newsletters, photos, videos, and other educational resources relevant to our classroom!




2014-08-31