Twitter and Summary - Part 2

So yesterday I shared the idea of using 140 characters or less to summarize on paper.   If you would like to continue this thought using technology here are a few ideas:

• If you want to create the look of a actual tweet check out:  http://www.classtools.net/twister/ - enter in the given info and it creates apage that looks similiar to an actual twitter page.  This could also be a great writing prompt.  have the Tweet posted on the screen and have students respond to the tweet. 


• If you have access to computers check out TodaysMeet:  http://www.todaysmeet.com/ - you can create a temporary chat room and have the students go to the url and enter their summary in the chatroom.  each response is limited to 140 characters.   This way students can see each other's messages.   You can decide if you want the chat room to last a few hours, a few days, a week all the way to a year.   No email address is required.  Chat rooms can be saved in transcript form to have a record of who said what.

Summarization and Twitter

Summary is a skill that crosses into every subject area.  As a history teacher I wanted to have kids summarize, but I needed some tools to get started with.   As an ITS I am still looking for ways to help kids learn to summarize that is relevant to them, which is what brings me to the topic of this post:

  

Twitter and Summary

 

Background on Twitter: Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging site that lets informal communication happen in small snippets…it is like e-mail, but you have followers that you can keep up-to-date with "tweets" of 140 or less characters. 

Over time twitter has been adapted to meet the needs of the user including the "@" symbol to reply to someone else's tweet or a hashtag "#" to add labels or tags to tweets to allow users to follow topics or to find tweets more easily. #summaryidea

Ask students to compose a tweet to summarize a concept they have learned or a passage they have read in 140 characters or less. Can they do it? Can you do it? I've attached a template that contains 140 squares that can be used to compose the summary statement.

   Summarize in 140 characters or less

 Think about this activity as a ticket out the door activity with a note card you turn in on the way out or a sticky not you place on the door for others to see and review.

Getting Social - in Social Studies and Language Arts

After a week at TCEA, I came home with lots of new ideas.  Here are some of them - Introducing social networking into the classroom, safely.  In this prezi i ahve a few ideas on how to integrate Twitter and facebook types of applications into the social studies and language arts classroom.



Resources:  http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/01/teaching-with-twitter.html;   http://www.myfakewall.com/w/Ben+Franklin_1