Tweet!

First blog of the school year!  How exciting!  The first week was a tough one for me.  Although I have taught grade 3 before, I have never taught grade 2 or grade 6, and adjusting to these age groups seemed to be a bit challenging that originally expected.  Grade 2 is so excited about everything, which is wonderful!  Grade 6 is much harder to impress.  So, my week with the 2/3 class went very well, but my time with the grade 6 students was a bit tough.  However, I think I finally got them with something!

I started a class Twitter account and made a Tweet bulletin board in the hallway outside our room.  This past Friday, I loaded Twitter onto the SmartBoard and showed the student our twitter page.  They were quite excited, but many were not sure what Twitter was or how Twitter worked.  But still, they were excited!  We spent a long time talking about the purpose of Twitter, how it works, what a hashtag is, how to use the @ symbol, etc.  Finally, these students were impressed!  Or I think they were!

My dog Mavis, who came to school to set up with me, posing for the camera!

We are only following 5 people right now; my personal Twitter (also used for school purposes), my husband (also their old English teacher from last year, whom they miss so much!), our principal, and two school board Twitter accounts.  My intention is to eventually choose with the students who to follow.  We will follow authors, artists, as well as other people studied in class.  I don't want to make any decisions on who to follow, how to design our Twitter page, what to put as our profile picture without them!

Since I can't have 24 students type and post their tweets at the same time on the account, I decided to give them all a dry-erase sentence strip and a dry-erase marker, where they would write their tweet and post it on our Tweet bulletin board.  From there, they would be typed up and posted on our Twitter page a few at a time.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, we as French teachers are looking for authentic, meaningful learning opportunities for our students.  Social Media has become such a big part of everyone's life and this is my chance to not only show these kids how to use Social Media for learning and networking, but how to use it responsibly and safely!  So many of my students have their own Facebook and/or Twitter accounts, and I hope that what we are doing in class with me will help them make responsible and smart decisions when posting photos, adding new friends/followers, updating their status, etc.

This Twitter "project" doesn't stop at writing one French sentence on a sentence strip.  It gives us numerous discussion topics.  The students worked in groups of two to write their tweets and with some reminders (since it was still week one), they were discussing in FRENCH what to write, where to place their @s and #s, how to spell a word, etc.  THIS is authentic for kids of this generation!  (I'm talking like I was a child a million years ago, but you get my drift!).

We all learned in Teacher's College that reflecting back on a task helps us learn and solidifies the concepts presented in class.  Tweeting about what we did in class is just another engaging way to do exactly this.  They are asked to think back on what we did in class, and respond in one sentence.

Please follow MmeStephanieIPS on Twitter to see our tweets as well as pictures that the students have selected to put on our page!
Note that it will take another week or so before our page gets busy!  I'm still waiting on photo permission information!

Madame Stéphanie :)

P.S.  Enjoy the pictures below!