Sunday, October 5, 2014

Twitter in 5th Grade

I was reading through blogs that focused in on 'A Year in Review' from teachers who I respect greatly like @TechNinjaTodd, @pernillerippp, @DeliaBush and many more.  One thing they all had in common was how valuable Twitter had become to them, as a professional development tool.  I remember thinking it would be great to expose my students to something like this, however my students are only 10 years old, and I do not believe they are ready for the world of Twitter.  

When I returned to school this week my co-teacher, Dani Marangon, had a brilliant idea.  She said we should create an area outside the class where the students can post what they have learned and we can call it our class Twitter Feed.  I instantly liked it and though it would be a 'cool' idea to have serve as an exit ticket.  These were the steps we took:

1) Laminated sentence strips so the students could use dry erase markers to update their status, erase and create a new learning update.  

2) On each sentence strip we wrote with a black sharpie the students first name, last initial with an '@' to make them feel like they are part of Twitter.

3)Created a large Twitter Sign using Block Posters.  We copied and pasted images from Twitter and then printed them out over 4 pages. W taped them together, laminated and posted up on the wall.





4) After our Social Studies class we had each student post one thing they learned from class.



As I was reading through the posts I became a little disappointed.  Many of the students were just writing facts that you could look up on Google.  Things like, "Spices, silk, and customs made their way from China to Italy along the Silk Road."  It was a true statement, but it involved no higher level thinking.  

So as we started the next lesson I made sure I 'Favorited' a few posts that showed higher level thinking and then spent the next hour showing the students how to create a new idea that raises their level of thinking.  The students were asked to pull out four important facts from one section of reading and then use those four facts to develop a 'New Idea' based on what they learned.


As I was walking around the room assisting students I could see they were grappling with what they had to do.  The could identify key points easily.  But connecting ideas from different sections of the chapter to form a new idea that wasn't even in the text was difficult.  I was so happy.  They were struggling, grappling, learning, and persevering.  After about 45 minutes we had over half the class developing ideas and sharing them with people in their groups.  By the end of class everyone was able to produce a profound learning statement even if they did have help from others.  


With the Common Core emphasizing the importance of non-fiction I was so proud of what my students had produced.  They showed they could dive deep into a text, pull out was important, and re-arrange it to say something valuable and new.  I now feel as though I have a tremendous tool to teach a portion of non-fiction reading that I did not before.  It all started with an idea from my co-teacher, Dani Marangon, who brought this brilliant idea for how to bring #Twitter to 5th Grade.


No comments:

Post a Comment