Three Emerging Roles Twitter Plays in My Class: Live Notes

Now that I have walked the students through the basics of Tweeting (Author Chats) and mentored what live tweeting (Field Trip) looks like, I am going to have my classes "live tweet" the class in a couple of formats.

Format 1: Small Group Tweets
Each day over the course of a week, iPads will be distributed to two different groups of three or four students.

Each member of the group will be assigned a role--Leader/Editor; Recorder(s); Checker; Spokesperson.

The Leader/Editor will track the proposed tweets according to a rubric/checklist. It lists the topics of the day--he/she must make sure that each topic gets represented by at least one Tweet.

The Recorder(s) writes the notes as things occur in class. Notes can be things said verbatim, or they can also note their confusion or something they feel requires more coverage. This is potentially a job for two people. This information is done on loose leaf or in a writer's notebook.

The Checker takes the notes written by the Recorder and checks them for accuracy and makes sure that it fits into a Tweet (140 characters). He/she may edit or polish the note into a more efficient Tweet.

The Spokesperson actually enters and publishes the Tweets once the Recorder passes them along. He/she also presents them to the rest of the students during the last five minutes of the class. He/she provides an overview of the material their group was able to capture for the da.

Over the course of five classes, I imagine (and am planning on) the students will have created a useful study guide of the day. An added bonus, when students miss class and come later and ask, "what did I miss?"...I finally have a really strong response: check the class twitter account? On a related note, it will be useful for me to see what the students interpreted as essential information, as well as how they interpreted it.

I will be able to have the groups who are doing the live tweeting project their iPad on a screen on the wall--so the class can see the notes evolve (if I think that may be helpful).

Format 2: Large Group Tweets

All twelve iPads would be distributed to the class--two students may share an iPad.  As things occur in class, students are encouraged to treat the class as a text we were doing a close reading of together. Where we would use otherwise use post-its or highlighters to mark our confusion in a book, note our connections, ask a question, jot down an inspired though, we would now tweet those same concepts based on whatever we were doing in class.

The class account can be projected to a screen in the room, and as students mark their thoughts, we can see them and engage.

Here it would function as backchannel, but now there will be a record of it.


Final Thoughts

Each of those circumstances could also be placed on our district website--sort of an open classroom idea.

I anticipate executing these ideas after our brief Thanksgiving break.