While implementing Twitter in my classroom I have been doing a lot of research about the topic. I ran across a good article today about teens and Twitter. The basic premise is that teens aren’t using Twitter yet because they are using Facebook to accomplish most of the other purposes of Twitter. When I even mentioned Twitter in class the kids didn’t get the point of it and they thought it was “creepy” to follow someone (as this post also illustrates) but it no different than reading your friends’ status updates. The article states that one of the biggest uses of Twitter is marketing (or self promotion) and most teens don’t need to do that yet.
I will go one step further and say a lot of the adult users of Twitter are people who don’t have Facebook pages and if they did they would probably use Twitter a lot less. Also, I think teens don’t use Twitter as much because cell phones are treated like a cancer in high schools. If we tried to embrace this technology rather than shun it, we might fine that we can make good things happen.
This is a questionnaire I distributed after the first weekend of the Twitter project. I wanted to see how many students were following me and assess how they were using the service and if it was helping.
This is an e-mail I sent to the parents regarding the Twitter project. My two main goals were to educate them about what Twitter is and to make sure they did not think I was trying to put their students in harm’s way. The letter got a little long, but I think it has some good information.
We have begun the great Twitter experiment, to test whether or not Twitter is a helpful tool in a high school physics class room.
Purpose: To determine if Twitter can be a useful tool in a high school physics classroom.
Hypothesis: Twitter will not be a useful tool in a high school physics classroom. (Note: For those of you who have not enetered the world of academic reasearch yet, this hypothesis may seeem odd. If this is your educated guess, why would you even bother? This is what is referred to as a null hypothesis. You assume that the change in the variables will have no effect and then you measure you data from that.)
This is the pre-questionnaire I gave to students before I started my Twitter project. It’s purpose is to assess how students are using texting now and if they have heard of Twitter.
Why do people work, fight, and cheat there way into this country to achieve the “American Dream” and then not impress upon their children the importance of education? Education is the basis of the dream, and these kids don’t get that.
I had a young man say to me he couldn’t wait until he was 16 so he could drop out of school. I asked why he thought that was a good idea and he told me that lot’s of famous people didn’t go to school. When asked to name a few he said TV stars and rappers. I walked away scared for the future.