Twitter and Haiti

The BBC's Newsround were due in today to cover a story about using Twitter to support learning. They didn't turn up, but we had great fun anyway! Two of the students acted as reporters during the lesson, so I'll let them sum up!

The lesson required very little planning, the main point was to collect some questions beforehand:

After some internet safety discussions, the students paired off and selected a lucky dip question: the tweets were printed off and cut up. My laptop case provided the 'hat' :-)

The lesson was livened up by some great interaction via my Twitter account. Students used a netbook, connected to my classroom's wifi,to communicate. The live feed was displayed for the class to see. An unexpected impact was the personalisation of learning. If the initial questions was too difficult to explore, pupils soon chose a new question from the live feed. In addition, I used Ian the iPhone to snap pictures of good work that were broadcast on the live feed.

I would like to thank all of those who supplied questions or got involved in the day. I'm not sure how sustainable this use of Twitter is, but as the interview at the start of this post reveals, the class seemed to value my small role in the lesson!

The PPT embedded below includes screenshots of both the incoming and outgoing live feed.

Haiti Earthquake 2 Weeks On

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