What are we tweeting today?

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Brigitte Léonard, Annie Côté and Sylvain Bérubé use the same tool, but their educational projects are different. Not only did they create meaningful activities in their image, but they adapted them to the age of their students.

In Brigitte Léonard's first year class, there are only two computers connected to the Internet. The students therefore work in workshops. At 6 and 7, they are learning writing and calligraphy. "Everything that is written on Twitter where the blog is written in paper and pencil beforehand, she explains. I insist a lot. We have a writing book, that's where we write. "

The teacher also takes advantage of the flexibility of Twitter to send photos to the following classes. “Photos of objects, landscapes, but never of students. I keep a little embarrassment on this, ”she nuances. Thus, she sketches on the spot a logical continuation to question another class or the cover of a book to share a good reading. “It's made natural for my students,” she adds. It's so well integrated into the classroom routine that they want to communicate with friends. »Does she use Twitter only to develop their writing skills? No. By projecting the messages received using its interactive digital board (TNI), this enriches the reading periods.

If Brigitte Léonard has used Twitter every week since the start of the school year, it is different in the groups of Sylvain Bérubé in third secondary. Over the past two years, he has hosted a few one-off activities using Twitter. This year, for example, during a storm of ideas, he resorted to Twitpic, an application that allows you to send photographs via Twitter. "I had written about fifty words on my TBO, my ordinary whiteboard," he explains with a smile. The students have photography all to work on the rest of the project in the laboratory. "

His students, those of Annie Côté and Delphine Regnard have also worked in collaboration as part of the International Week of the French Language and the Francophonie 2012. “We wrote together the instructions for our students. Using the tool Meeting Words, they wrote a story in 10 tweets using 5 words from Quebec and 5 others from France, he says. At the end of the week, we tweeted the best stories ”.

Last year, he also invited his students to participate in a ClavEd, an online discussion in which edutwitters participate on Wednesday noon of each week. On this occasion, the students had the chance to express themselves on the integration of technologies in school. Following his experience, the teacher mentions the importance of preparation. “A few days before, my students signed up on Twitter. Together, we studied the tool. However, my students did not participate much because they had difficulty following the conversation ”.

Annie Côté's groups lived their Twitter experience in a whole new way. The French teacher in Secondary V forced herself to live out her homework project only for a few weeks. "We must vary the means as we must vary the types of texts, otherwise it would be boring in the long run," she says.

It therefore requires working sometimes on very small language units and sometimes on texts of 500 words. For her, the theme has a big impact on student motivation. “From my point of view, it has to be fun,” she adds. On Twitter, my students really had fun. The theme should be broad enough too to allow them to be creative. " Examples? Pay homage to someone or something, write a horoscope, a news item or even a fake quote. Ms. Côté also lends herself to the game to write her instructions, which obviously have 140 characters.

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