Read a bit of Andrew Keen at lunchtime. I do feel like I ought to. I like heretics. Still, it’s a pretty miserable read. Immediately cheered up when I got back to my desk, though, by a tweet from my 9 year-old boy’s class saying: “We have just compared two story openings. We have focused on the characters and settings.” His class and the other year 5 class at his school are using Twitter to update the world on what they’re up to.
A couple of kids in each class act as ‘Twitter monitors’. They send a couple of updates per day, that’s all, but it’s a really heart-warming thing: I’m getting a stream of tiny snap-shots from the chalkface. I feel closer to my Son and to what he’s learning (and it’s an improvement on the “er… I forgot” that I get if I ask him what he did at school today).
The idea is to give outsiders (principally parents) an insight into classroom activities and, ultimately, to connect classes together. A class here in the UK could follow one in India, for instance, and vice versa. I’m pretty sure Mr Keen would hate this, of course. But am I bothered?
Fantastic. What an idea. Was it yours, by any chance?
Keen is a troll. He can’t possibly believe what he says. Maybe he even thinks he’s performing a useful social function, playing Devil’s Advocate.
My son’s primary school tried blogging with Year 6 which I thought was great, but clearly it didn’t work for them as they stopped doing after about a term.
But it was wonderful to be able to get a sense of what the school community is up to and what’s going on in the classroom.
Maybe I’ll have to see if they’ll Twitter instead.
A really nice idea, Steve. And perhaps a tad less arduous than a class blog. They could capture the RSS, though, into a tumblr blog so they can add pix and so forth when time allows.
Not my idea, in fact. Matt Johnson, Deputy Head, came up with this one. We’ve discussed capturing the stream using Tumblr: a kind of ‘study diary’.