I started using twitter because I was curious about what people were doing there.   I did not know anyone on twitter so I started following newspapers and journalists of the news channels I found interesting.  I ended up adding very many channels and newspapers.  I also followed how twitter was used during the Arab Spring to organize people for democracy in Egypt for example or when big news event occur.  We can find out many times faster on twitter than on the radio or television.

As a result of that process, I started using more ideas from current events in my classes.  I started looking at children’s newspapers as well.  I started the first year I thought French Immersion.  Using current events in reading and science engaged my students.  The first topic I used in class was the disappearance of the bees with articles from Radio-Canada. The gifted students found this fascinating since it was related to the real world and was authentic. They were eager to learn and I told my struggling grade 6 students that they were reading with my help what French adults were reading.  They felt that they had progressed significantly in learning French with me since I was their first teacher who had used this approach before with them and that their level of French was very high.  The subject of the reading became the topic of the French Speech Competition.  That first attempt was a complete success.

I am now starting to use twitter to connect with other professionals who have similar interests.  It is a good way to link to other professionals that we may never meet otherwise.  We can talk to people all over the world and find people ready to share leading edge instruction.

Reading Fisher and Frey in their article Preparing Students for Mastery of 21st century skills, it strikes me that it is not the students who need to understand technology, it is more the teachers and academics.  They mention that to unstress teachers, Marc Prensky discuss that we need to stop thinking about technology in terms of nouns (PowerPoint, Youtube, twitter) and use it in terms of verbs (presenting, sharing, and communicating).  I find it quite striking that this needs to be mentioned in a conference and in an academic paper.  I do not share this fear, but this tells me very many teachers may be lost, and overwhelmed in using twitter.  The role of the leader in technology education would be first, to make teachers comfortable with using technology.

Leading edge teachers have used twitter for guided instruction (Fisher & Frey).  Biology teachers and history teachers have used twitter to send messages to students who need scaffolding ( I am assuming here in high school).  More recently, I have read about grade 5 and 6 students having silent debates on twitter in their second language (French).  When dealing with such young students we need to think about the nature of twitter.  When a message is written, it is written for eternity. Although the idea is fascinating, being able to tweet in a second language to people in other cities and other countries, the thought of having students so young, talking publicly like that, even if supervised, can be quite frightening.  We do not want to create a situation where what they say may haunt them later.  A more controlled environment is quite necessary for younger students.  As well, the volume of information on twitter is becoming quite large and the quality varies.  The critical skills needed when using a search engine are needed when using twitter.