I appreciate the role Twitter plays in Teaching and Learning. This week I saw a student teacher connect with her sixth-grade students by asking them to compose a Tweet on what they learned during the class period, 40 words or less. After working to pare down a lengthy research journal article to 25 words or less, I appreciated this exercise in summarizing. You need to possess some sense of enduring understanding to summarize effectively. Twitter, when used well, encourages this skill. I will never forget the numerous times I’ve heard my advisor, Dr. Katie Dredger, say how she loves Twitter because it forces people in the field of English Language Arts to get to the point. When students in my Teaching Adolescent Readers class were given an assignment to read a young adult novel that could be paired with a classic and create a product that they would expect their students to create, one student used Twitterature. He created a rubric, as required by the course, and a model Twitterature that reflected his own product involving Hamlet that was composed using Glogster.
Couple these experiences with Flipboard and the quality educational news stories shared, information in general passed in regards to teaching and learning, and professional learning community camaraderie, and Twitter had me at first tweet. Well, almost. I joined in 2008 and warmed up this semester due to a course requirement.