How Do You Tweet in the Classroom?

For many teachers today, twitter is the hottest new tool making a huge impression on how we connect with our classrooms today. I think that taking such a fun tool and using it in a perspective that helps to spread the word of whats going on in your school will be able to reach out too many more than just an email in a more interactive way. I love that not only are you going to be able to have your students, parents of students, colleagues, and others see your posts but you can get new fresh ideas from other hashtags that could really help teach your lesson more proactive. After reading the article on, "The Teachers Guide To Twitter",I feel that its giving every ounce of advice on to use twitter for new comers to the twitter lifestyle. At the moment I am twitter-less but I think its crazy how many different tweets there are to use and how many different sites or pages each hashtag can then connect you to.

The pros and cons when it comes to twitter in the classroom can go both ways, I like how you can create a more organized classroom, research updates, and even blogging as a group. I believe that the cons could be students could abuse this power of posting inappropriate blogs or even just not use it if they don't find interest but I like to think the educational value of the site has more power to the cons. I love how the article twitter classroom talks about how you can use surveys, and help absent students reach out to get make-up work, I feel that would be the most useful part in my twitter classroom. As for the age group for the twitter accounts in the classroom I feel that ages middle school & up would benefit and flourish but I feel younger age groups wouldn't take it as seriously.

After discussing about the need for a twitter page or any source of social media in a sense I now feel that having some type of media is better than none at all. I believe if your not trying to get connected how are you actually going to become a great teacher without the panel to connect in. I feel as though if you are saying no to twitter for personal means or just because it seems like too much work, that you are not sabotaging your professional connection you're sabotaging your students, by not making that effort to be technology incorporated.

In the new tool called, "Participate" I found the site to be a very useful way to as a future teacher be able to find new apps, lesson plans, websites, and even videos for a narrowed down topic. For example I will be specializing in first grade math, when I narrowed down my browse bar, I found over 20 different apps most of which I feel my students would someday really benefit and enjoy from. I feel students especially younger love to play games to learn because it doesn't really feel like they are learning because of how much fun they are having. To look closely at one resource I found for example to play around with whatever grade level and any different math topic where the students can watch videos, play games, and practice on the site, the site is called Math Chimp.