Into The Fire - Tweeting in class?

My original opinion of twitter, after seeing how many of my friends used it: A bunch of people shouting into the dark about whatever is on their mind, regardless of who, if anyone at all, will hear them...

Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to a popularity contest on twitter this year. This was one of the first times I learned something about what twitter actually is, and it helped ensure my resolve to shun it as a trashy networking site. When I saw twitter show up on a class syllabus this semester as a location for my professors’ office hours, I groaned out loud. Just this week, as a requirement for one of my classes, I have signed up for twitter. A teacher talked briefly about the advantages of twitter in a classroom environment, which blew my mind. Again, my conservative fear of unleashing technology in the classroom paints a daunting picture of a chaotic classroom where kids are tweeting with each other rather than focusing in class. I see this as a higher tech scenario of my high school days (I admit it, I was a bit of a joker with the cell phone myself), when teachers consistently confiscated cell phones. I can only imagine today’s classroom where students must be text messaging each other constantly during class time. I will try not to be alarmed when I encounter this during my student observing/teaching in September.

What surprised me the most in class today was that I actually caught myself trying to imagine myself using twitter to facilitate discussions in my future classes. Two different videos brought this on: one where a second grade teacher use twitter to connect with another classroom in another school while teaching about technology and acceptable use, and one where a college class at University of Texas in Austin uses twitter in a lecture hall to facilitate a discussion for the entire class. Most of the students seemed to love it, praising twitter’s speed and efficiency in getting information to the large screen behind the professor and the fact that it can give students who might normally be shy, but with lots to say, a voice in class (I’ll overlook the blatant ethnic stereotype that immediately followed this declaration in the video). When there is a large class, it can be difficult for a teacher to include everyone in the discussion. I thought these clips were eye-opening, not just to how some of this new technology might be a useful tool for me in the classroom, but also that many different teachers of different age groups are already using it for a myriad of purposes. I started fantasizing about how I can use twitter in the classroom to bring authors, movements, questions, and other topics in literature to life for my students. One classmate mentioned a twitter account for Emily Dickenson, breathing new life (and possibly new relevance!) into her poetry via using various lines and quotes. My first reaction was to imagine what a twitter account for Dante Alighieri would be like. My second reaction was excitement, as I feel strongly about removing students from their everyday colloquial language, hopefully opening up different ways of using our incredible, dynamic language for expression.

But here comes the old dilemma: as I talked about it in my last post, how do I manage the Big Tweety Monster in the classroom? How do I keep my students more on task and less into social networking in the classroom? This is a different scenario than the one with impressionable second graders, who will likely listen more to lectures about acceptable (and even safe) use of technology.

Also, I hope my literature classes will be smaller than that lecture at University of Texas, and that I will have no more than 35 students. As much as I value giving the shy students more comfortable opportunities to speak out, personal interaction/face-to-face discussion is irreplaceable. I want my students to be able to learn from each other by discussing things while sitting in the same room, looking at each other. I don’t think I need to even start to explain why that skill will be helpful in so many ways throughout a lifetime. Communication lays immovable and vital at the core of any humanities class, and one mission of the humanities in education is to build both socially and mentally proficient members of society. I can not imagine feeling good about myself as a literature teacher if I let this priority go!

Any thoughts/ideas on how to apply something like twitter in the classroom, specifically for literature?

Thanks for reading!
-Adam