Educational Microblogging

Since writing my last two posts on Monday, a couple of things have come to my attention. One of them being that I needed to find another article, and the other that people really do read blogs! Let's address the latter first.

Someone read my post "Twitter or Spoink?" and forwarded it to the founder of Spoink! How do I know this? He sent me an email! That was certainly a shocker, let me tell you! And that email is where I found my first understandings of how such sites could be used. It seems some teachers currently spoinking have their students documenting progress on projects in business or robotics, and in creative writing classes students have been assigned100 words a day and uploading the media that inspire them in their task. I certainly hadn't thought of anything as creative as that!

But what are other teachers doing on other sites? I found an article from Education Week's Digital Directions for June 2008: "Educators Test the Limits of Twitter Microblogging Tool". This article contains a couple of different ideas. These include allowing teachers to network, providing students a place to respond to teacher-posed questions, collaborative efforts such as story writing 140 words at a time, and generally just preparing students for life in a digital world. However, the article also puts forth the security concerns many teachers have had with microblogging. In fact, one teacher from the Bronx built Youth Twitter so that teachers could have administrative control over their students' work and try to protect them.

So, has all of this helped me to figure out whether or not I will someday use microblogging with my own classes? Not yet. But it has piqued my interest, so you can believe that I will be doing more reading before and after I land a classroom of my own. Though, I'll need to come up with a project or plan that I can really get behind. I can't see using certain technologies just because their out there. There is so little time to cover everything as it is that one must be judicial in choosing activities.