4th grade elementary teacher sharing her journey of implementing facebook and twitter in classroom
- Bethany went from no Facebook or Twitter In one year's time
- Became interested because of a personal business
- Parents and students were asking "Are you on Facebook
- How do I separate the personal and the professional
Suggestion for Facebook
- Recommend using the "add pages" in Facebook as a way to separate personal and professional
- Groups was also an option
- Pages have "fans" - no commitment and a publicly available url that does not require a facebook login (activates one you have 100 fans)
- Groups have members and administrators
- Settings are crucial - she is not allowing post backs
- Helps to get the word out to parents/communicate
- Attaches the Follow Me message on e-mails
- Taking screenshots of Facebook page to share parent comments from the "fan" page with the students. Sharing positive comments, extending the conversation
Twitter - @mrsbeaudrie
- Using the retweet feature to share newsworthy information with parents and administrators
- Using http://cotweet.com/ and http://twitpic.com/
- Alert parents about snow days or reminders
Implementing Facebook
- Using a dry erase board and asking "What will you share?"
- Students post all day long
- Make one post per day
- Sharing how her son's pre-school is using shutterfly to share photos
- Changes when we ask our children "What did you do at school today?"
- The twitter post is student updated using a classroom computer
- Bethany tries to provide some editorial help but also give room for the student work
- 140 characters is emphasizing concise writing
- shallow vs. deep thoughts
- Age restrictions (under 13) must involve the parents
- Will not allow students to use real names (safety concerns)
- Applies classroom "umbrella" rules to digital citizenship
Collaboration
- Started collaborating with a class in Maine
- Compare and contrast themes
- Data collection
- Get answers and input from other students
Bumps in the road
- Parents involvement has started out slowly
- but student interest is high
- The parents are on Facebook the next step is to have them become a "fan"
- Facebook is still blocked at her school
- Decided to use blackberry (cell phone) to post during school hours
Using http://weebly.com to set up website - http://mrsbeaudrie.weebly.com
Using Co-tweet to aggregate the district educators and present all of the streams as a unified twitter identity. Interesting way to generate standards and accountability. (my thoughts)
Class twitter account is generally set to "protected" for privacy concerns
Always reminding parents and stakeholder about the facebook and twitter accounts via e-mail, newsletter, and verbally
