Tweet Tweet!

I have finally joined the world of twitter, tweets, and everything else the site entails. Despite being a huge fan of Facebook, tumblr, and a multitude of blogs- I’ve never really had any desire to join the tweeting revolution. Sure, I’ll admit that I’ve checked out celebrity tweets more than once to get a glimpse into their sporadic thoughts (sometimes discovering there isn’t a whole lot of thought going on), but that’s about the extent of my experience. I didn’t really see why I would need one, since I have status updates on Facebook if I really want to let people know what I’m doing or thinking.

Twitter was relatively easy to set up, and very easy to connect with my classmates. However, it only took about two minutes after joining that Julia and I were both messaged by a random tweeter asking, “are there any single guys there to chat?”

And we weren’t the only ones that got spammed right out of the gate- everyone saw that charming comment referring to male parts posted on our class feed right after it was created.

The issue of spamming and inappropriate comments/links makes me continue to lean more towards the Twitter is bad  party, since I’d rather not have the experience of listening to a chorus of Grade 11’s in my classroom saying, “Miss Patten? Someone from Colorado is messaging me to chat!” (Or any other variety of equally awkward scenarios- you get the idea.) With e-mail and classrooms sites such as Wikispaces, I sometimes wonder if that is more than enough online connection for students and teachers? I’d like to think that students can still survive the 21^st Century classroom by actually bringing paper sheets home from school and writing due dates in an agenda rather than an e-reminder. We all did it, and we still made it to university! I’m leery to become dependent on technology to share the breadth of our classroom thoughts and discussions, because (as we all know)- technology does fail from time to time. How sad would it be to lose all that collective effort if nothing was actually written on paper?

However, I do see the potential in Twitter. It could be a fantastic way to send out those last-minute reminders to your students about exams, papers, and alike. A class feed would allow students to post questions/comments and they would be able to respond to one another, continue classroom discussions, or even post upcoming events that may be of interest to their fellow classmates. I realize that we, as teachers-in training, need to keep an open mind and try to experience a variety of media that we’re bound to run into in the classroom- or at least recognize the influence they hold in our students’ lives.

So here we are, one day later and I’ve tweeted about four times. I’m giving it my best shot to see what potential this service holds, but so far I’m not sold on its place in the classroom. That being said, it has only been one day so I’m not giving up on Twitter just yet.

Happy tweeting everyone!