How many different ways do you try to get reminders and homework assignments to students? I’ve tried all sorts of things like writing the week’s assignments on the whiteboard, an assignment sheet for the whole chapter, Remind101, and my teacher page, but nothing works better for me than Twitter.
I didn’t know much about Twitter before I started using it. When I saw a presentation about how you could create a “widget” and embed it in a website, it got me thinking about using Twitter in the classroom. A widget is just an interactive window that can display tweets from one person, a group, or a certain hashtag. Here’s a widget that displays recent Tweets from a popular Twitter group called EdChat.
I didn’t know much about Twitter before I started using it. When I saw a presentation about how you could create a “widget” and embed it in a website, it got me thinking about using Twitter in the classroom. A widget is just an interactive window that can display tweets from one person, a group, or a certain hashtag. Here’s a widget that displays recent Tweets from a popular Twitter group called EdChat.
There’s a downside to services like Remind101. You have to get people to actually do the work to signup in the first place! With students, you can get them to signup in class, but with parents, it’s much more difficult. I wanted something that could reach both parents and students easily. The great thing about Twitter is that if kids are using it, all they’ll need to see is whatever hashtag you choose to use for your course. They already know how to do the rest. With an embedded widget on your website, parents and students who don’t use Twitter will be able to see what is going on without creating any extra accounts!
Twitter, hashtag, widget, embed—it all sounds complicated. Don’t let me scare you! Once you set it up, there is nothing for you to do but tweet out whatever you want to share with parents and students. At the end of the day all I have to do is tweet the assignment, put the hashtag at the end and it goes to whomever is following me on Twitter as well as straight to my teacher page. |
Once you get started using Twitter you’ll love following some of the great education Tweeters out there. Carol listed several in her blog about Professional Learning Networks. (Carol's Blog) A quick Google search will find you many more! Each day these folks send out great lesson ideas and links to articles and research about education. You can even set up Flipboard to bring in your Twitter feed like Brandy suggested! (Brandy's Blog) I find that to be a much easier way to read things from Twitter. |