I would have to admit that social networking and micro-blogging weren’t my number one priority when meeting my new class of 30 six-year-olds in August, but tweeting has since become a daily routine for the 120 children in Year 2.
We already sent home ‘parent newsletters’ detailing our upcoming units of inquiry, but this update (every six weeks) didn’t answer the question which I anticipated the children were asked the most…
“What did you do at school today?”
I set up a Twitter account for the year group, and integrated the feed into our school(Moodle based) learning platform. My year group colleagues were very supportive of the idea, and initially I updated the feed at the end of the day, with one tweet from each of our four classes. The class teachers took responsibility for writing their own updates and we began to see parents joining Twitter specifically to follow us.
When we started sharing the process of ‘tweeting’ with the children, that’s when we saw the real potential. Now, at the end of each day, we take 5 minutes to be reflective, thinking about what we have done and learnt during the day. Articulating our reflection into the 140 characters forces us to be effective communicators. The children prioritise what they want to share, we consider our audience (parents) and while we started out with purely factual tweets, these have since become more sophisticated and actually encourage our parents to ask questions!
We received this feedback from a parent:
Just a quick note to say how much I enjoy reading the tweets each day. Previously, the
generic "what did you do today?" was met with "I don't remember" but now I can
ask specific questions like "How is your Eric Carle wall coming along?" which results
in an actual conversation!
I’m really pleased that these tweets are being used to foster parent-child-teacher communication. I hope this Twitter dialogue helps to set up a student-led conference every night at the dinner table, and I hope that parents working away can call home and engage (almost magically) with their son or daughter about their day at school.
