Week 10: Using Twitter for Teaching and Learning

Learning from Hashtags

I chose the hashtag #edleaders because I am part of the leadership team at my campus. My two administrators and I are new to this campus so we are learning about the culture on our campus. Since I am new to the leadership role as instructional coach and I am also interested in becoming a principal someday, the article by Tom Waters “Leadership That Questions” caught my attention. Waters writes about how most of us do not like to be told what to do and yet it is a principal’s job to clearly communicate the vision and goals. He states that a principal can share these through questioning. He does not believe that a strong leadership should be about disseminating information, but rather about learning from questioning. During the questioning, a leader should make sure to be an active listener. He offers questions that the leadership team can pose and share. The purpose is to learn about the culture of the school. This article reminded me of what a former principal of mine used to say. He would always tells us that it is extremely important that as an educator and principal you have to make sure that you continue to be a lifetime learner. I understand how important that is as a teacher because you can learn more about the content you teach, but you also learn from your students. The students I seemed to learn the most from were the most challenging ones. I tried to see what I had to do to engage them and keep them focused, and of course, I learned patience from them. As a school leader, I can see how the teachers will become my students, and I will continue my learning and growing partly from them. Not only will I learn from them, but also from my new experiences and on the job training.

Link: http://http://teamtomwaters.blogspot.com/2016/07/leadership-that-questions.html

Ideas for Using Twitter for teaching and learning

The first idea that came to my mind was to have fourth through sixth grade students use Twitter to write a good summary using only 140 characters. Students in fourth through sixth grade struggle when it comes to summarization on the STAAR test. Having them select their words carefully to provide a summary of what they have read is not an easy task, but it will be one that makes them think. After everyone shares their summary with each other using the same hashtag, then the students will have to select the best summary out of all of the ones that were shared on Twitter. This assignment would be aligned to the STAAR test because they are asked to select the best summary out of four options. Another idea for using Twitter would be to have third through sixth grade students post a statement in which they would persuade their classmates to read a book they had read and enjoyed. The purpose of this post would be to encourage students to read for enjoyment. Too often our students are reading because they are assigned reading for homework and not because they want to read. Perhaps, if their classmates recommend a book, they will be more interested in reading. Yet another idea for fourth grade could be to provide the students with a simple sentence and have them elaborate and provide “vivid” words to create a better sentence on their Twitter account. This assignment could be given after a mini-lesson on word choice. We encourage students to “retire” the more commonly used words such as happy and sad in order for the writer to provide a reader an expressive and thoroughly enjoyable experience.