Why should we use micro blogging tools in the classroom? One powerful reason is that students spend a considerable amount of time microblogging each day. While there are currently no Australian statistics available, US statistics show that teenagers between 13-17 send and receive over 3000 texts each month (it's higher for girls) and spend upwards of 2 hours each day on the web (most of it on facebook - you can read a report about it online here. You might also look at it with your class and ask them to compare their experience with what is being documented in the research). That's a lot of time essentially being spent reading and writing micro blogs - short pieces of text recording the author's views about whatever is the hot topic of the moment. So if our kids are producing and reading all this writing, why aren't we trying to harness some of this enthusiasm in our class?
Over our next couple of blogs we want to look at micro blogging tools you can use in your classroom. Many teachers already use micro blogs in their classroom to get students to keep:
*Learning journals
*Create pages on areas of interest
*Create pages on a topic / theme being studied
*To work collaboratively
*To write for an authentic audience
Today we're looking at 'disposable' pages. These can be a good starting point for blogging in the classroom, because they are tools that allow you to create pages without requiring a sign up or login, and aren't designed to keep forever.
One of the easiest tools to use is Jottit. This tool allows you to create an instant, short web page without needing to sign up and create an account. Later, if you want, you can add a password to the page so you can revisit it and add to or change it. Another web tool in the same vein is Penio, a more attractively presented version of Jottit.
These two tools make great ways for doing some blogging on the fly, getting groups to collaborate on or present their work, or to get stuck into some micro blogging without any hassle. In future weeks we'll review tools with more advance options for microblogging.
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