My students are becoming a Tweeter!

Follow my class on Twitter!  @kielclassroom

My purpose in trying Twitter was for a few reasons.  First, I wanted to introduce students to Twitter  and have them practice participating in a controlled social media account.  Additionally, I felt Twitter was a great way to teach main idea and summarizing (they can only have 140 characters) and a good communication tool between our classroom and the world! 

What did I do to set this up?

1. Create a free Twitter account for your class.  I used @kielclassroom for mine.
2. Show your class the YouTube video, "Twitter in Plain English". 
3. Go through the PowerPoint, "What is Twitter?"  During this, we talked a lot about safety (once you post, it's permanently there) and who our audience will be. 
4. Then, we logged into our account.  I showed them how to log-in, how to read other's tweets, and how to compose a professional tweet (they must end each tweet with their first name only). 
5. We went through the directions sheet and the class calendar.  I also put 2 students in charge of posting the names on the board of who will be in charge of tweeting that day. 
6. Then, we did a sample tweet together, as well as found people/organizations we wanted to follow (we made a rule that students needed to ask the class before following someone, since this is our class account).

So, follow us on Twitter (@kielclassroom)!  It's a work in progress!