You Are Now Entering the Twitterverse

I have been an avid tweep for over a year now. I love how it gives me the opportunity to stay in touch with so many people, and up to date on so many avenues of information. This form of micro-blogging is definitely a plus when it comes to social networking, but what place, if any, does this website have in the English classroom?

In my opinion, Twitter can bring so much to the English Ed. community. Here are some of my ideas:

-Last year, in our methods class, our teacher designed an activity where we created a Twitter account for different characters from Romeo and Juliet. We chose pictures to use as their defaults, clever locations and bios to include in their profiles, and even played around with their backgrounds to represent who we thought they were. And these were only the initial great pieces of the process that got us thinking through the perspective of the character! Then, with a partner who chose another character from the play and created a profile, we chose a scene to recreate in tweet-speak. We held a conversation, full of slang, hashtags, and modern language, between Romeo, Mercutio and Tybalt, in the fateful scene where Mercutio is slain. We laughed as we thought of how these characters might tweet, and played around with Shakespeare's language. We could certainly adapt this activity to any text that we read. (If you want an excellent example of a character's Twitter, see @Lord_Voldemort7. But be warned, he is a bit vulgar, critical and extremely sarcastic!)

-In the intro to Twitter video for this mod, the creator showed how some teachers used Twitter to hold book talks, or discussions surrounding a book students were reading in class. I think this is a clever idea, but I think it might work even better if we have students use their tweets as a reading log. We could ask students to read a certain section of the text for homework, and require that they post questions, reactions, comments to the text as they read, using a specific hashtag in each tweet so that we create our own class reading response thread. This could easily turn in to a space for students to share their immediate feelings about the reading with their classmates, almost as if they were sharing the notes a skilled reader might put into the margins of their books. This might be reassuring to students who see that others are confused about the same things they are, get them thinking about the text differently based on the comments others add to the thread, or stir up questions that they want to ask of their classmates. (This might even help with the issue of encouraging students to read outside of school!) These could all be brought in to our classroom discussion about the reading, and as a teacher, this would be awesome because I could see ahead of class what areas we need to talk more about, and what parts of the story are really resonating with the students. What a great starting point and organizational tool for discussion!

-I also love the connection that Twitter gives us to public figures, such as authors. Students could easily hop on Twitter and mention the author in some of their questions or comments about the text. What an awesome experience it would be to have an author respond to or retweet you! Or, an author's Twitter might give students access to their thoughts, possibly on the text, and maybe even links that they can browse about issues within a text or current happenings surrounding it. For example, if you head to Laurie Halse Anderson's Twitter, you can click around to find a recent issue some brought up with her novel Speak being a form of "pornography." Surrounding that post are Halse Anderson's responses to the claims and the outpouring of supportive tweets she received from her fans. Another way to stay current on a text and show students how it's (in some cases, still) relevant by introducing them to current discussions surrounding the text!

-Just as many celebrities offer their followers scavenger hunts, I could tweet different "hunts" to my students. These could involve having my students find something unique within their reading assignment or searching around online for a factoid I set them after. The first person to tweet me the answer wins!

-Since many students might already be using Twitter, I could use it as an easier resource for them. Each day after school, I could quickly tweet a reminder of the homework assignments for that night/weekend (so that they don't forget), or post links that I think might be helpful or interesting to them. The nice part about Twitter is that you pick and choose what you want to explore, so if students weren't interested in a link I post, then that's okay. I like the casual nature of micro-blogging over a class blog for these purposes. It seems like a friendly, gently suggested supplement to what we're doing in class.

-Another purpose I'd like to point out is the "daily" possibilities of Twitter. While I think there can be great benefit from a word of the day, or a quote for each day type activity, it's often difficult to find time for these activities during a 40 minute class period, if you want students to pay them proper attention. A teacher could update her Twitter each morning with one of each (a word and a quote), and students can explore them as much as they'd like. If they already know a word that I choose, then they aren't wasting their time. If they really like a quote and want to discuss it further, they can reply to me or their classmates, or share it with their followers. If I incorporated these into our time in class, I might feel that I'd have to cut students short if there was more that they wanted to do with them-more questions, more discussion, more connections-so that we could accomplish everything that we set out to do, at least on most days. Twitter leaves the door open for whatever they choose to do with any of the daily posts I share with them.

-A final thing I love about Twitter is retweeting. There is a lot of great stuff out there, and a ton of people that one could follow, but it's impossible to take it all in or read all there is to read. What Google Reader has done for the Internet has not yet been developed on Twitter. BUT, if I see something that's worth sharing with my students, or they see something they think we'd like to read, all you have to do is click Retweet. Or, you can RT with a specific user mentioned, so it shares the tweet with that specific person. There are so many times that I'm on Twitter and I see a tweet that reminds me of someone, or that I think would make them laugh, or that they'd love to read, and when I student taught, I often came across things that I would have liked to share with my students. This is just an added bonus feature that I think will help add to the community within the classroom.

These are just a few of the ideas I have come up with or have come across for using Twitter in the classroom. The possibilities truly are endless once you step into the Twittersphere!