"Tweeting All Teachers"

The Teacher's Guide to Twitter states that "the best way to get the most out of twitter is to use it." Most of my students are most definitely getting their use out of twitter. The article also states that "you see hashtags everywhere." I hear them ALL of the time. I even taught my students the word for hashtag in Spanish so that have to refer to it in Spanish in my classroom now. "Twitter is too big to ignore." Twitter really is everywhere. I had been against "tweeting" because I didn't think it was useful up until this week when I had to create an account. I did find that some of the people that I started to follow really do share useful lesson plans, ideas etc. I found myself clicking on them and looking at what they had suggested.
The Teacher's Guide to Twitter also suggested that you "become friends with your enemies." So often in school districts teachers hoard their lesson plans and refuse to share ideas with their colleagues. In fact, I have worked with teachers in my past that do this but I have also worked with teachers who believe in sharing everything. "Why reinvent the wheel?" they say. I believe that without collaborating and sharing our ideas, we really are reinventing the wheel. Why not share your ideas?
The second article I read this week was called A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom . Using Twitter as a Bulletin Board was their first suggestion. They said to use it to communicate about homework, useful information, class cancellations etc. I liked this idea, I just need all of my students to have access to the internet outside of school, and I know that they don't.
The last suggestion that they shared was creating pop quizzes on twitter as bonus points. I liked this idea also and could see myself doing something like that in the future.
My favorite suggestion was to use twitter to silence a "blurter" or someone who shouts the answers out in the middle of class. I can think of students very quickly that this would work well for. Maybe I will try it sometime while I am still participating in this class and I will let you know how it goes.
Twitter is too big to ignore, I just wish I had more time to spend tweeting, reading other tweets, and creating lesson plans using twitter. Now that I know all of this information i hope to use it to better my practices in the classroom and use it as a collaboration tool.
Hasta luego,
Alissa