Blogging & Twittering

The learning of Blogging and Twittering was a slight challenge for me. I am familiar with the two, but this was my first experience getting my feet wet and learning. The two have taught me several things and have shown me innovative ways to help teach in the classroom.

Blogging, I learned can be a great tool to use in an English teacher's classroom. It's a new way for students to write and journal. I like the idea of going paperless. Doing this makes it harder for students to have excuses about losing homework. It helps teach them accountability and deadlines. By setting up a blog it allows students to further class discussion and be able to interact with class at anytime. Students can use their own blog to post assignments. This is also a way for students to research and get other ideas. In addition, blogging helps students be able to become more interactive with their work and that motivates students to work harder. And my bring the world to the classroom it helps students learn how to network early on.

By setting up Twitter I have learned some creative ideas that I can use in the classroom that I never thought of before. Twitter is good to use in the classroom because it engages students with technology, they can respond to questions, it utilize mobile technology and meta cognition. By using this I can foster community within and outside the classroom by generating discussions. This may be more useful then blogging in this aspect because since Twitter only allows 140 characters at a time it will help students learn how to express their thoughts in a concise and clear manner. The benefit for the real time response is helpful because as a teacher it will allow me to communicate with students outside the classroom and help them learn at all times. I liked in the video the creative writing examples that were shown. I plan to follow @manyvoices because it shows just how unique and special Twitter can be. I like the idea of having children from all over collaborate to support and write about one main idea.