Being a classtwit

I have been an evangelist for using twitter in the classroom for some time now. It has been a slow and frustrating slog. To try and convince teachers to use it for professional development has been meet with scorn and redicule. The teachers who have "bought into" using twitter for sharing and learning, have grown to become evangelists with me and have experienced personal learning growth and a renewed interest in their learning and teaching. But it is not for "sussies" as we say in our part of the woods....! You have to get it, and that is not exactly easy. It reminds me of trying to teach the kids maths. You do not get it unless you do it- consistantly, on-going-ly and with de-ter-mi-nation! There is just no other way. When it comes to using Twitter for T & L-it is a higher order thinking tool!

Looking at how teachers are using Twitter in their classrooms globally also seems to me as if (apart from using it as a personal learning tool), it is mostly used for sending learners homework notices, keeping parents informed and letting learners "tell" about what is happening in the classroom. What I am now really interested in is how we can use it to ACTIVELY learn. So often we use new technologies to do old things in new ways (who said that again?). I want to know about how we can facilitiate learning innovation by using twitter to get kids to really think, problem-solve and question.

So I have found some innovative teachers who are very brave, and are prepared to go on this journey with me and become classtwits. My role is going to be to support them, get them to overcome barriers and strategise ways in which we can achieve the above stated goals.

We will document our journey here, and you can follow our progress either here or on twitter under the tag #classtwits. If you are a teacher who have started on this journey already, please jump in and give us some pointers!!  I have made a list of global classtwits where you can easily follow them using a tool called http://tweepml.org/Classtwits where you can either follow the whole list or choose classtwits to follow! I will add our group to the list as soon as we are ready to rumble! If you want to be included in the list and are on this same journy with us, leave a message in the post with your twitter username.