Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Twitter Warm-up for Your Classes

Today my colleague, Doug Zywiol asked his US history classes to Tweet him the biggest hurdle facing George Washington when he started his presidential term.  If you go to @dougzywiol you can see the student responses.  To have your students do it, they simply need to add your Twitter handle to a text and then you can project the responses on the board or simply have your students use their smartphones to look at and discuss the answers.  Alternatively you could make a hashtag (just put the "#" symbol along side any class name you might invent (such as @Zywiolclass) and then have your students add this to their text.  Then go to the newly made site to see all of the Tweets.

By the way Zywiol's government students were doing their government service hours and met Barbara Comstock (see image above) who is likely to be a new member of Congress come January and of course they Tweeted about it so Zywiol's other students could see it.

Obviously no matter the subject you teach, you can use Twitter to start your warm-up.  If you are like us and have slow laptops, it can be done while the laptops are logging in. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Mr. Halla,

My name is Aimee Perkins and I am a student at the University of South Alabama. I am taking an education in the media class and was assigned to comment on your blog post. We were actually making lesson plans for students last week in class and our professor was asking us better ways to engage students in the lesson about to be taught. No one in the classroom even thought about Twitter to use as a way of interesting students. After reading your post I am definitely going to have to pass this along to my class!