Yesterday, I stumbled on this blog post by Amber Coggin where she shared a blank SMART Notebook Twitter template with her readers. It looks pretty cool and interesting. Now, regardless of your opinion of SMARTBoards, if your district has purchased some of them and it does imaging, chances are the SMART Notebook is installed on your computers. The Notebook software is a very powerful tool for creating content, interactive content, if you will and is pretty easy to use.
Now, why would you use a template like Amber’s?
I like what I see in classrooms that use Twitter to send out messages to the world and get a few back in return. Aviva Dunsiger’s classroom, for example, uses that quite nicely. With this template, I’m wondering about a couple of other things.
The simplest thing that I could think of is to go through the process of creating one’s one Twitter profile. Whether or not your students use Twitter (or even can because of blocking policies), going through and talking about the components of a Twitter page is a very good literacy activity. Even if you can’t look at a profile online, you could certainly create one in class. Talk about what and how to share; privacy of information, etc. All that good stuff.
So, I looked for another idea and thought about this.
In this case, I’ve created a Twitter profile and ****** out the name. But, I’ve filled the timeline with facts gathered from the Wikipedia. I loaded some recent images and identified a couple of individuals that would be similar to the account.
If your students understand Twitter, they’ll know the layout and the type of information. If they don’t, they will now.
All that they have to do is roll up their sleeves and do some research from the facts given to determine who owns the Twitter account.
I’m thinking that this might be an interesting new way to introduce a topic or a concept based upon one or more of the participants. In this case, the War of 1812.
doug --- off the record 