Or at least that’s the unsubstantiated claim put forth in a recent US News & World Report article. According to Terry Wood of St. Mary’s Ryken (MD), there has been a “dramatic decline” in the writing abilities of her students “due to Tweeting, Facebook, and texting.” What strikes me as unfortunate, if not irresponsible, about this statement is the causal link Ms. Wood draws between social media and a decline in writing abilities (See: Correlation does not imply causation). Using only anecdotal evidence, she states (as fact) that social media is making our students terrible writers.

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“I become apprehensive when I hear people tell me about how our students are all “digital natives.”  My hesitation stems from the fact that some educators have twisted this buzzword beyond its original definition into a dangerous catchall.  For some, the phrase is used to define our students as a monolithic group of tech gurus.  At best, I think this tends to obfuscate students’ dearth of practical technological skills, and at worst, it leads to a conception that all students are technologically savvy.”

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“This school year I embarked on a journey to introduce my students to Twitter.  For the first three quarters of the year, I structured “Twitter projects” to supplement my in-class work and to provide additional support in meeting certain academic objectives.  Throughout the course of the year, the number of tweets coming across steadily increased …With no ‘official’ fourth quarter Twitter project, our class feed sounded much different.  Any tweets now coming across represented more of the proverbial “cricket” noise in an otherwise peaceful environment…”

The first question I asked them was:

What is the best academic benefit of using Twitter?

Hearing what my peers think about issues 37%
Learning things I wouldn’t have otherwise 34%
Sharing historical resources 17%
Helping to draw connections between past and present 12%

My students, like most teenagers, enjoyed using Twitter for class, but would likely not use it if I had not introduced it in class. In an effort to dig more into this, I asked the following question:

What would make you use Twitter more?

Easier to see people ‘replying’ to me 31%
Better integration into Facebook 22%
Following more people/orgs who have similar interests to me 19%
Others using it more 19%
Better integration on my mobile device 10%

And then, just out of curiosity, I asked the following:

What ways do you use/follow Twitter?

Web interface (twitter.com) 93%
Tweetdeck 34%
I get emails telling me there’s been an update 10%
App on my mobile device 8%

I also had a couple of open ended questions:
Name one thing on Twitter you’d like to learn more about.
Ideas for 3rd quarter Twitter assignment?

I took these ideas and created our third quarter Twitter assignment.  In this assignment, I also added some appendices to help address the results from above.  For example, I created an appendix that walked students through three ways to see when people replied to them.  They seemed to like the tutorial on how to use a RSS feed email alert to see when people replied to them.

The sample size was 59, or about 90% of my US History students.  I used Google Docs to create a simple form for the students to fill out, it worked great.

Part of ‘entrepreneurial teaching’ is engaging with things you do not like (or hate).  That’s what I did with Twitter.  I originally I thought that Twitter was the dumbest, craziest, worthless site on the internet.  I had to put that aside to give this lesson a shot and it has been a great success.  Next time you think the same way about a teaching technique or anything in general, why not try it once?  After all, if you are not trying things outside of your comfort zone / personal bias (like Twitter was for me), you’re never going to improve as a teacher.

I wanted to take a few minutes to elaborate on the article and share some of my lessons learned.

• Just because a class is using Twitter, does not means that is all the class is doing.  I cannot believe I have to say this, but yes, people actually think that I have jettisoned the entire curriculum for Twitter.  Twitter is a supplement to our already robust curriculum.  Everything I do on Twitter is in addition to what we did last year.
• Twitter makes learning student directed.  There is no classroom, no textbook, no review guide.  It’s openness forces (allows) students to think on their own and organically apply knowledge.
• Students become more engaged in history when it is relevant (duh).  Since the students are, on their own, tying current news stories to themes from US History on a regular basis, it is fostering engagement.
• Applying themes from one era of history to another is critical thinking and critical thinking is a positive.  We know history repeats itself, but do you really know how much?  It only takes a student 140 characters to relate the credit crisis in Massachusetts in the 1780s to an article from today, but that student now has (at the very least) opened the door to a deeper understanding of both events.
• It doesn’t matter what type of student you are (quiet, loquacious, weak writer, creative, analytical, unfocused), Twitter can engage you.  I’ve seen it.
• Getting students to think about your course outside of class is always good.
• Some people will automatically shut off or tune out as soon as they hear the word “Twitter” – I know because I used to be one of them.
• My Twitter assignment does not “replace” the research paper component of the US History course.  However, for those not participating can opt to do a research paper instead.  Twitter, so far, has tremendously improved my students research skills, making them more information literate.  I see this as adding to, not taking away from (since nothing has changed) the research paper component of the course.  A few mentions in an EdWeek article helps give you a ‘taste’ of my class, but don’t assume you know everything that is going on.
• Twitter is not a panacea or a plague, but especially if it fits into your own strengths, give it a shot, you may be surprised at the results.

For teachers, even entrepreneurial ones, sometimes it is easy to be caught up with ‘giving demands’ as opposed to ‘satisfying demands’ (the word demand is somewhat strong, so it may be easier to think of demands as ‘pedagogical demands’).  Sometimes I get caught up ‘giving demands’ to my students only to wonder, in retrospect, if I ‘forced’ them to spend all of their time satisfying my demands without satisfying theirs?  For me this comes as an uneasy feeling deep inside my stomach — I think a feeling that every educator feels at one point or another.

On the other hand, for some assessments/activities a real symbiotic exchange where my pedagogical objectives and my students’ pedagogical needs are both met.  Obviously, these are the exchanges need to be replicated.  Sounds easy writing it down: just teach to meet your curricular objectives and the students’ pedagogical needs.  I understand that in practice this is incredibly difficult.  The reality is that the needs of one class, well really one student, often vary dramatically (and maybe change daily?!).  So while I hope to stay more in tune with my students’ demands, I think the key is to hone in on large ‘demand trends’ among students.  For example, I see hundreds of good teachers on Twitter every day trying to adjust proactively to meet the demands of their students.  Many conversations revolve around the inclusion of social media in the classroom.  We already know that most teachers work a significant amount during summer ‘vacation’, but can you imagine if every single teacher sat down and really brainstormed different ways to respond to his or her students’ pedagogical demands before class started!?

I think a good teacher responds to the demands of his or her classroom everyday in some way.  For many, it is part of that innate entrepreneurial trait to add value, take advantage of opportunity, and satisfy demand.  Others, I think could benefit from professional development that helps them flip their ‘entrepreneurial switch’ in a very similar way that Darryl’s was by his entrepreneurship class in high school.

So here are some of the Twitter-related opportunities I see (for me personally):

1) all students can now carry cell phones in school
2) we’re going 1-to-1 (macbooks) in 2010-2011
3) students spend an incessant amount of time on their mobile devices and home computers.
4) Twitter offers a unique platform to aggregate different parts of the internet
5) Twitter is simple, instantly gratifying, and can be used from many different interfaces (all important to students).

I am sure that there are more, but this is what came to me at first. So the question became how can I use Twitter to enhance my classroom experience or, if I was an entrepreneur, how do I take advantage of this opportunity to add value for my customer?

Given my excitement over this opportunity, I turned to our first unit in US History. The US History curriculum (non AP) at our school starts with the present day first and then begins with pre-colonial North America.  This approach allows our team to highlight the key historical trends that we will be discussing all year with news stories that are happening today. It provides a nice level of relevancy that the students carry with them throughout the year.  Usually, as a team, we put together a plethora of news stories to make a little primer for the two-week unit.

I currently have two ideas for extending this unit, one short term and one long term.

1) short term: cut back on the number of stories that we ‘give out’ and let the students find them on their own and make brief comments through Twitter.  Use the stories and comments to facilitate our classroom discussion.  Allow, temporarily, to use cell phones (or if they are using a laptop) in class to Tweet thoughts on our discussion as we go along (that maybe we didn’t get to or didn’t want to say out loud).

2) long term: request that every student for each chapter highlight one (two?) of the key themes and then find current events stories addressing that theme.  After finding the stories they obviously have to tweet about them with a comment.  Once a month we can come together to discuss parallels, lessons learned, emotions, etc.  Each section already has a ‘note buddy’ that is responsible for taking good notes and posting them online.  I am considering making a Twitter buddy to aggregate the postings per section into a mini ‘report’ for us to use during these discussions.

Just wanted to share a practical way I am trying to take advantage of an opportunity in my school.