@'s and #'s: Educational Tweets

"Twitter shrinks the world," or so says Scott Akerson in his blog post, Twitter - Expanding Our Classroom - Shrinking the World.  In his commentary on the famous micro blogging tool, Akerson describes a situation in which one tweet led directly to his class collaborating with a school in a different state, using other electronic communication tools in a shared learning environment.  Which got me thinking--even though Twitter might not be the best tool to ask your students to use (given certain confidentiality laws and school filters), you can still use it as an educator to enhance the learning context for your students.  Essentially, Twitter does make the world a smaller place, and effective users of the tool can bring the rest of the world right into the classroom.

And though I made the comment that Twitter might not be your first choice as a student-operated tech tool, Michael Keathley listed more than a few ways that would fit the bill should you have the option. His blog post, 28 Creative Ways Teachers Are Using Twitter, is just that--a list of ways that teachers have found Twitter to be helpful to the common goal of enhancing students' education.  Amongst the announcements (#4), class poll (#15), and current events tracking, (#19), my favorite is the shared storytelling (#11).  I can recall doing this at a summer camp one year in my youth (without Twitter), and it still stands out to me this day as one of the most fun activities I could do on a rainy day.  Not to mention, in the context of education and digital medias, it's quite the power-packed activity; like a Cliff Bar for exploring genre.

Shared storytelling is definitely my number one pick for using Twitter in the classroom.  But for creativity's sake, I'll come up with a new one (though Keathley's post has certainly made it difficult to be original...)

How about a modified version of the scavenger hunt (#22), students could use tweets on a field trip to report the answers to a field guide, or to participate in a more tangible scavenger hunt, rather than one contained within the school.  Maybe the students on a field trip can communicate with a class that is not on a field trip in order to convey information in sort of a blind-collection, where the class-bound students lead the field-trip students to destination points, and the field-trip students send back information they find... Sounds like fun to me!