Conferences or educational events should develop a protocol for tweets. The conference can set up two twitter hashtags, one for social comments and one for content comments. The social tweets include references to the weather, the crowds, the excitement, the food, the desire to see a famous speaker, how great a speaker is, where someone will go for supper, etc. The conference can simply add an “s” to the end of its usual hashtag such as “iste13s”.
For content, a “c” can be added at the end of the usual hashtag as “iste13c.” These tweets would include specific content such as something specific the speaker said (“Tuttle says to put wireless on all of the campus, not just in the buildings,” questions about the speaker’s ideas “What mobile activities would students do outside the building?”, or connections such as “Yesterday Smith also talked about mobile learning being physically mobile.” If each tweeter tweeted just one content about each session, the critical ideas of the whole conference could be tweeted.
During and after the conference, attendees and others can search for the “c” comments so that they can learn from others without having to sift through all the purely social comments. They can quickly learn powerful concepts from the conference.
In a similar manner, classroom teachers that use tweets can develop appropriate hashtag endings to represent the different categories, types of thinking or levels of thinking in the class. For example, an English teacher may add “p” at the end of English104 to indicate poetry analysis or an “e” to indicate tweets about the essay so the class members can quickly find the appropriate learning.
My modern language blogs are now at http://bit.ly/imprml. I have developed 25 Spanish activities and 4 Modern Language Visual activities that allow students to begin to express themselves in the modern language and to begin to move toward spontaneous speaking Teacherspayteachers: http://bit.ly/tpthtuttle.
cross-posted at http://eduwithtechn.wordpress.com
Harry Grover Tuttle teaches English and Spanish college courses at Onondaga Community College and blogs at Education with Technology. He is also the author of several books on formative assessment and the new ebook 90 Mobile Learning Modern Language Activities.
