Twitter and Blogs

This week and last our class has been doing some very exciting new learning! We began using Twitter and blogs, learning how to use social media to connect with and learn about people all over our country and the world!

We have a class twitter account that you are welcome to follow @mrskellysclass (you can also see the tweets we send out by looking at the left side bar on my class blog where we have a Twitter feed) and we are currently following 5 other classes, 4 first grades (one in Illinois, one in California, and two in Canada), and one Kindergarten (in Williston, VT) because that Kindergarten teacher is the one who taught us how to use Twitter in class! I have spent the last week and a half teaching students about what Twitter is and how we can use it to connect with other classes, what a Twitter handle and a hashtag are, what "following" and "posting" are, and how to make concise, quality comments! Now every afternoon right after recess we have "Twitter time" where we project our Twitter account up on the smartboard, read tweets made by the classes we are following, make connections and reply to them, check what tweets we received, and make a new tweet for the day telling the first grade classes who follow us what we are learning! We are using both giant wall maps of the USA and world as well as an interactive Google map to chart the locations of all the different classes we are connecting with. Our class is loving this experience!

We have also started blogging, which kids are loving as well. We have a classroom blog (this one) and have been using it to start learning about what a blog is and what it is used for. One of my favorite ways to introduce blogging to the kids each year is by familiarizing them with this blog participating, as a class, in a quad blog, which we started last week. Our class is partnering with three other classrooms (one other in VT and two in the UK -- England/Wales) to make the quad and over the next few months the four classes will take turns being the "focus class of the week," posting to our blog and receiving/responding to comments from the other three classes. This is wonderful for teaching the kids about making quality posts, quality comments, sustaining a conversation on line, and learning about students in other places! I am also very focused on teaching our class about being good digital citizens by learning about online safety (not giving out personal information), being kind and appropriate because what we say on the internet is fairly permanent, and connecting with others for learning purposes. The kids are seeming to grasp the idea of being digital citizens in an online community very well after just finishing our unit on Community Helpers where we learned much about being citizens in communities. This was a great segue!

After diving deeper into the features of our blog and checking out the blogs of our quad members students in our class started learning about their own individual blogs (which they love!). Our class blog is supported by blogger but the students' blogs are supported by a much simpler, kid friendly forum called KidBlog. All of the students' KidBlog accounts can be found as links on the right hand side of this blog. Kids are encouraged to use them at home and it would be wonderful if family members checked out the blogs and made comments to the students. They are so excited when people comment on their posts! Each week when it is a students' day to share in class it will also be their computer day during literacy block and they will use that time to use both their RAZ kids reading accounts and their KidBlog accounts. Therefore each child will have at least once a week when they will use RAZ and blogs in class but they are encouraged to do more at home as well! After we have practiced blogging on our own for a bit our class will pair up with the class next door to us so that each student can have a blogging buddy. The two students will get to go back and forth reading and commenting on each other's posts each week, giving them a more authentic audience.

I get very excited about technology and using social media in class (especially since the students are just as thrilled by it) and could go on and on (I see that I already have) but I'll stop for now. Below are some photos of us beginning to blog and tweet. Stay tuned for more social media adventures from room 5 (including Skype connections)!

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