Twitter Goes to School
These are my notes and takeaways from the session titled:Twitter Goes to School presented by Chris Bigenhoc. He’s from the Greenhill School in Addison, TX. His blog is here.
Considering my most recent rant, I am interested in how he is using Twitter to connect students/teachers and their stories. My focus will be looking for ways to use a simple tool, Twitter, to connect people through story. Here goes:
Leads off the session with the question: What could you possibly say in 140 characters? Lots. What about the Nike logo? No text, rich meaning.
Tweeting should be all about story. Have you ever wondered why people tweet/post about what they are eating? Its engrained in the very fabric of storytelling history. Imagine thousands of years ago, men sitting around the campfire, painting on cave walls what they ate. Ug…mammoth hunt…kill mammoth…dinner…full…ug. Ha Ha!
Have you ever wondered what Rosa Parks say on her Facebook page? What would your students post on Rosa’s page? What if Mozart and Jimi Hendrix followed each other on Twitter? What would their conversations look like? Check out http://twhistory.org/ and StoryCorps podcasts for more.
Chris spends the next 45 minutes retelling the story of the Iranian elections last year as seen through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. He reaveals how much richer and complete the story through social nextworking was compared to the mainstream media’s account. He includes the story of Neda, the teenage protestor that was killed by government police. Chris has a wealth of documentation in the form of archived tweets that tell the story quite completely and from many different perspectives. And its a story any of us, or our students, could have written ourselves into at any given time.
On a side note, he used a very cool powerpoint plug in called Autotweet! It allowed him to put his notes in the note window in powerpoint, and as the presentation is made, it tweets out the note as the slides progress. Very slick tool. I will absolutely use this.
Great, great session by a fantastic teacher. His story example today led to a lot of good ideas that I’ll share with my teacher friends in Guthrie. Although his focus today was not dealing with the student/teacher or student/student connection, it did demonstrate how to use Twitter to make a meaningful connection to a story. Looks like he has lots of twitter resources here: http://delicious.com/bigenhoc/twitter .Thanks Chris.
