My Adventures with Twitter

This week has been a real resolve tester. The schedule is starting to grind the students and the teachers into dust. I don't even think a giant pay raise could help with 170 students and only 1 hour planning. So, after a week of fighting with the last period of the day, the most difficult for all involved, I am going to celebrate some of the wins I had with my experiments in Twitter.

I set up a Twitter account for my AP Students only. It came after a year of "You should tweet that, Ms.G" requests. I'd like to think that half of this profession is being a great performer. It's like stand-up with lessons. So, sometimes in the effort for a laugh to reassure me that my students haven't drifted into a complete coma, I say some things that may or may not be measured as witty. Most of my humor escapes the standard classes for I am a huge nerd and these classes are devoid of huge nerds, but the higher level classes are replete with them. A key principle in teaching, and in comedy as well, is to know your audience. I know my lesser motivated students will abuse Twitter as a classroom tool, but I also know that my more eager and intrinsically motivated students will bask in it.

Here are some rules for a class Twitter account:

-Never "Follow" your students. You will go mad reading the things you are not supposed to read. It's completely inappropriate and out of the question. This will set you up for many unpleasant lawsuits.

-Only follow awesomely educational Twitter accounts like Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Lord Byron, MLA, Grammar Monkey, Word of the Day. Do not follow people you know because your students can see and follow them. If you follow Word of the Day and the like, you'll only see these people's posts in your feed and you can re-tweet their posts. The poetry organizations will allow you to re-tweet all kinds of contests with sweet rewards!

-Do not post or re-tweet pictures of the students even if they tweet you with them. We just came out of Homecoming Week at our school and each day was a different dress-up theme. The students took pictures of themselves in my classroom and then tweeted the pictures to me. They can post whatever they like, but you cannot as their teacher. Because your students follow you, posting pictures of kids from other periods will make these pictures available to your other classes. Erring on the safe side, it's best not to re-tweet pictures just in case there are rivalries among your kids.

-Moderate who follows you. There are all kinds of very naughty spambots out there and creepers and the like. Make sure to set the privacy settings up so that if someone wants to follow you approval is necessary.

-Class Twitter is a privilege. Sometimes the semi-anonymity is too much for even mild mannered students to handle and you may get one or two sarcastic comments that can create that awkward moment between authority figure and rebel that causes the entire class to simultaneously gasp in horror. Twitter makes this interaction irresistible to some. So, warn them of the consequences and then take any student who is being squirrely off of your list of followers.

-Twitter interactions should never be a grade. Because some students do not use or even like the program, you will have about one-third of your class left out of Twitter and that is fine. Twitter should be a novelty, something extra - the whipped cream for your overly eager students.

Fun to Be Had!

Now that we are done going over the recommendations for making this experience work, let's get to the fun part, challenges!

When I was in middle school, I had the same fantastic science teacher for three years straight. Pre-Internet, he offered weekly challenges. They were impossible, yet intriguing. We would work our brains out trying to solve them. More time and effort went toward the challenges than we would put into the actual class. (I have often noticed that students will work harder for extra credit than for real credit). Twitter can be an avenue for these types of activities.

My first challenge was a caption contest. Sine this is an English class, finding the perfect title/subheading, etc is a great activity. I posted a personal picture of my goldfish stuck in one of the decorative robots we have in the tank:

At first there weren't many entries. The winning entry was "Finding Nemo:The Later Years". I then openly tweeted that the student had won the prize. He remarked that he wanted a car. A trip to Walgreens later and he was, indeed, the proud owner of a Hot Wheels car. Upon presenting this student with his "new car", the class was hooked.

The next few contests/challenges were related to their readings and they were as follows:

For One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Sum up the book in 140 characters; tweet from the POV of one of the characters
The Count of Monte Cristo - What would Abbe' Faria's Twitter user name be?

If students do not have Twitter, they can submit their entries in writing, so they can also have a crack at a dollar store prize. I teach seniors and they still go crazy over prizes, stickers and candy.

The next request I am thinking about deals with pictures of grammatical mistakes. I also have some ideas brewing over a class poem written line by line using only 140 characters.

I have also used to program to point students in the direction of my class website for the updated material they need to have printed (since copies are limited along with paper and ink).

Twitter is proving an instant success! The other day a student tweeted a link to a news story concerning the actress in the film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and I was able to re-tweet it to the class.

On days where I have not been there, the students have tweeted me "Get Well" pictures. If they are not in class for a school event, but want to show me that they are dressed up for Homecoming, they send pictures of their outfits. I think one of the best pictures I have received was a picture of two students at a debate tournament at Yale holding their trophies. Even former students in college have requested to follow the class.

I know this utilization of Twitter is one of those things that can only really work in some classes. I have had AP classes that I would never do this sort of thing with, but in this profession you have to grab on to any thread the students give you and yank on that until you've got their buy-in to the material.

During rough times (like this entire month), it's important to reward the few who are motivated and capitalize on the smallest opening of interest. Instead of dwelling on frustrations, overshadow them with victories. This Twitter experiment has definitely been one of them.