Using Twitter as a weekly writing activity

How to use twitter in the classroom....

Another thing I used in my classroom was twitter (http://www.twitter.com/).

I used this site as a diary for my students.  They had to write in it once a week.  The purpose was to have them produce English writing once a week.  I did not check their grammar, subject, or anything else.  If they asked me personally, then I did, but the purpose was for them to write in English a little bit a week.

One of the best things for this site is that it is dated, so you know who wrote what and when.

At the beginning of the semester, I gave out my students a handout:

At the end of the semester, my students handed in the sheets to me.  I would go online, into their twitter account, and check to see if they did the writing. 

This is the second semester I did this and I will continue to do so in the future.

Other ideas I have are:

1.  Giving them weekly topics to write about.  Short questions that require short answers.
2.  Use this as a mini-blog for low level students or grade school students. 

Summary, twitter is an excellent way for students to produce writing in English on a weekly (daily) basis.  Even though it may be only 140 characters long, producing a few sentences is better than not writing at all.

The feedback I get from my students are positive and does improve their writing skills.

A few semesters ago, I took "Multimedia" with Professor Curtis Porter.

Some ideas of multimedia applications were presented in class.  Here is one of the ideas I used with my students.

The website is http://www.glogster.com/

This is a website where students can make multimedia posters.  They can add text, pictures, videos, music, etc.  I have done this with my students as an assignment.

The great thing about this site is that it is only in English.  Without formal explaination, I asked the students what I wanted, gave them the site, and do the best they can. 

I collected all the posters and put them up on my bulletin board at school.

Here are a few examples:

Try it out.  After the students finish their assignment, they feel a great sense of accomplishments, especially because everything is in English.

Lesson Plan

Here is my lesson plan for Critical Pedegogies for the Spring Semester of 2012.

The idea is based on the story of the blind men describing a different part of the elephant.

Level:  This lesson is flexible to be used with all levels, adjustments would be needed.

Class size:  Flexible

Goals:  There are actually a few goals intended when doing this lesson. 

The critical pedegogies' goal - to let students realize that what they think may not be the bigger picture.  One point of view is not enough to see the whole story.

The English goal - For students to use their creativity and English freely within a loose boundaries.  Also, for students to realize perfect English is not always necessary, utterances of communication is more essential than grammar itself.

I took frames from a short commercial called "3 Generations".   Depending on the class size and groups you want to make, I made about 8 frames.  There are 2 handouts.

(It seems I cannot upload files, or at least I can figure it out so I will leave the images)

1.  First you give each group one picture.  You ask the group to write all the words they can think about when looking at the picture.  Don't give any more directions than this.  It is up to you as the teacher if they can use a dictionary or not.  I would assume, higher levels would not need them.

Since I cannot upload the files, here is a sample and you can make one on your own with the pictures below.

2.  After writing their words, they can label each word to see if it is a noun, adjective, verb, or adverb.  You can skip this part.  I only did it to give some extra work for my students.

3.  Then I would hand out the next handout.  They would list the words, translate it, label it (optional), then write out sentences.

4.  After they write their sentences, as a class, add all the sentences together to see what kind of story they wrote.  

5.  Then show the video.

Here is the link to this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFyicQr2a1M

6.  Have a class discussion on the video, the class' story and the similarities and differences. 

You may get very different results than I did, however, I think the class' engagement in this activity will surprise you as much as it did for me.

Good luck....