Ms.C


 * Ms_Caleb- tweets from a new tweeter**

Monday, July 9, 2012 As a new tweeter, I have set up a professional twitter account that I want to be able to use for myself as a teacher and my students. I want the page to represent me, as a teacher. One of my main goals is to have my tweets capture my personality, love for learning, and love for teaching, which cannot be that easy to do in 160 characters. I aim to communicate with my students via a social network that they are used to and comfortable using. I want our relationship to extend beyond the classroom; of course, in a responsible way. I am really excited about tweeting information that I think my students should read and/or know on a daily basis; those things can include: recent newspapers articles, inspirational quotes, or even just reminders, but it will be information that I may not have time "teach" them during the day. Another important goal is to see what twitter has the capability of doing. I am unsure of all of its features and the effects those features can have with my students or in my classroom. I want to become familiar with twitter and all of its applications so I can utilize it effectively and responsibility with my students. I am a little apprehensive about using such a popular social networking account with my students though. I continuously use the term "responsibly" because it is vital that my students are still respecting me, themselves, and one another online. I want to be able to communicate with my students but do not yet know how I may feel if I read something they may tweet that is disrespectful or irresponsible. While opportunities for learning are great, I do not want my students to feel like I am invading their personal space.

Sunday, July 15, 2012 I have to tweet a message to Professor Marshall, and I have yet to be able to answer his question in the allotted character space. It’s so difficult writing down everything I want to say in less than 140 characters. I can use twitter to help students learn how to summarize short articles. It was challenging for me to do that and I think it will be equally challenging, but beneficial for them to do it. Because of the limited amount of space short-hand is necessary!!! Abbreviating words, combining words, leaving out the spaces is all a part of it being able to say what you want to say on twitter. One problem my students have is translating from this social language into academic language. I think it is going to be imperative to teach them the difference, which means they are going to have to translate their own shorthand into academic language. One way I can help teach them this skill is to have them complete writing assignments in their social language on one half of the paper and then have them translate their language into formal academic sentences. I want them to know that social short-hand is a language and so is academic jargon and code-switching is a skill that they must master.

Monday, July 16, 2012 Thank you Professor Turner for suggesting some people that I should follow. I have started following other professionals and organizations on twitter. It is very interesting to see what these professional/organizations tweet because some of their tweets inspire me to try some exciting things within my classroom. As of now I am still debating (with myself) about whether I should follow other people (non-professional). I made a list of pros and cons below. Sunday, July 22, 2012 Two followers! Shout out to Donald Speckhals and Read Write Think.org.
 * Pros || Cons ||
 * Students get to know me on a more personal level || I cannot control what other people write on their twitter (liability-inappropriate tweets) ||
 * Students are able to use twitter as another vehicle to speak with me about things both related and unrelated to school (relationship building) || Students will be unable to separate the classroom from the twitter world (middle school) ||

Monday, July 23, 2012 Today, I have learned more about hash tags. This is where one can trend a topic putting the #sign in front of the words that I write. If I would like to trend a phrase I cannot put any spaces in-between; I also cannot add punctuation marks. What I find interesting is that once a topic is trending one can see what other tweets are trending to the very same topic. One can also preview trending topics to see what popular things people are discussing. This is good for my students because I can trend common phrases like #homework which will always bring them back to the original tweet, and thus, the original homework assignment.

Friday, July 27, 2012 Get inspired! Every morning I tweet an inspirational message. It motivates me and if my students follow me it will motivate them. I hashtag #quote next to each message too so that one can easily go back to all of my tweets to get inspired. First #quote: Every great dream begins with a dreamer. You have the strength, patience & passion to reach for the stars & change the world. ~HarrietTubman

Monday, July 30, 2012 An interesting thing happened this week; I found one of my students on twitter, unintentionally. His screen name was something that I found to be, ummmm, totally obnoxious, but he is in 7th grade so I guess it’s allowed. In finding him, I saw on his twitter page many of my other students and their ridiculous profile names. Finding my students on twitter was interesting because I never thought about following them. Do I even want to? I want my students to follow me on twitter so that they can: get to know me on a more personal level (not too personal but my interests to say the least), get homework updates and/or relevant study material, become inspired by my daily quotes, and have more access to me. If I follow my students I think that there may be an assumed invasion of privacy on their behalf. I do not want to invade their social space by following them, nor do I want to read all of their timeline updates.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012 I really enjoyed following Donalyn Miller @donalynbooks. Between her tweets and re-tweets she had over four hundred tweets since July 12. I love her consistency; she tweets throughout the say and responds to a lot of people. She effectively uses her own tweets and re-tweets. I also like that most of her tweets have value and substance; she doesn’t tweet “woke up this morning and it’s hot outside” on a regular basis, although sometimes she wants us to know that she didn’t finish packing yet for her three day trip. She uses her twitter to effectively communicate with others about literature and ideas. She also tweets #bookaday which are recommended reads for younger students but I got my idea about hash-tagging the important stuff from her. Librarians, teachers, administrators, authors, parents, & bookish folks everywhere. Sign up to be a... [|http://fb.me/1H2OMEMdC] || [|#**bookaday**] Reading The Adventures of Nanny Piggins after finishing Bobby vs. Girls (Accidentally). Declaring [|@**dsantat**] Day. || Why didn't my 4th grade teacher/librarian friends warn me that pet deaths are common plot events? I spent 10 minutes crying over a goldfish. || [|@**ProfessorNana**] Publish your spam tweets as fan fiction! You'll make millions. [|#**eyeroll**] || I want to model her page (not in amount of tweets, she already has over 27,000) but in format. I think any of her students (or anyone) could look at her page and get to know what type of person she is without knowing all of her “personal” business.
 * [|**Donalyn Miller**][| ‏] [|@**donalynbooks**]
 * [|**Donalyn Miller**][| ‏] [|@**donalynbooks**]
 * [|**Donalyn Miller**][| ‏] [|@**donalynbooks**]
 * [|**Donalyn Miller**][| ‏] [|@**donalynbooks**]