I have been a Twitter-er for some time now and I thought that the medium would be a perfect way for classrooms to connect and share information. To this end, I have started The Kindergarten Twitter Project. The idea is to have kindergarten classrooms connect via Twitter and begin interacting through the Twitter interface. This would allow us to share a variety of information in short in a quick, short format. Twitter only allows 140 characters of text, so we have to be concise and to the point — perfect for our young students and easy for us to do.

Here is how I see it working:

• Each classroom that wants to participate in the project will create an account on Twitter. My classroom is called Mr_Davids_K
  
• We can use the settings to “Protect our Updates,” so that only classrooms that are approved may see the updates and post to the group.
• When setting up your account, please use the “More Info URL” to post your classroom website or a link to your school website. Also, use the “One Line Bio” to name your class and provide any other info you wish to share.
• We can then “follow” all the other classrooms in the project and begin tweeting to each other.
• Use your Tweets to share information like:
  • the weather in your part of the world
  • what you are teaching/learning in class
  • to ask other classes questions
  • share special days
  • post links to fun web-based activities
  • write short poems
  • shared writing/shared reading
  • short — very short — stories
  • start book conversations
  • we can use Twitter apps like Twitpic to share pictures, etc.
  • and whatever else we can think of
• As this is a project for Kindergarten students we need to:
  • keep our comments age appropriate and clean — please don’t spoil the fun. If you wish to have a personal Twitter account (and I know you do), please create another account and keep the two separate.
  • use only first names of students when posting — having parents sign a media release is also a great idea.
  • share photos of students whose parents have signed the media release saying that sharing of the photos is ok. You may wish to share the Kindergarten Project idea with your parents — they will love the idea of using this technology to connect with other students around the globe.
  • participate and share. Even if you do one or two tweets a day, that is great!
• I have created a account on Twitter to administer the project. This account will occasionally post Tweets related to the running of the project. Please follow username Kindergarten08
• The Fine Print: Twitter is run by Twitter and not by me. It does, sometimes–not lately-yea!, go down and there is nothing I can do about it. If you are having issues with Twitter please check the Twitter Help before sending me an email with an issue. I can try to help you out, but I am a kindergarten teacher and not employed by Twitter (if Twitter is interested in hiring an Instructional designer/kindergarten teacher, they will surely contact me and we can talk). We can, I am sure, resolve any issues we run into. Let me assure you Twitter is easy to use — your Kindergarten students will be able to do it as soon as they learn all the letters and how to type — so by the end of Sept. [a little kindergarten humor -- if you will]. You will probably have a couple of kids who can read already and are up to the challenge of writing and typing the posts. Then again, you may wish to do the typing yourself or as a whole group — “shared tweeting” anyone???

So, if this sounds like something you would like to participate in, create a Kindergarten Project Twitter account. Would you then, send an email to dpliska (at) edenpr (dot) org [replace the (at) and (dot) with the symbols] with your contact information (Name, School, E-mail, Web address if you have one, and your Twitter username). Once your account is created (about two minutes later), search for Kindergarten08 and request to “follow.” Once you are approved, you can click on the “Followers” and “follow” them as well.

If you have any questions or comments, use the comment form or send me an email (dpliska (at) edenpr (dot) org. **Please note** Due to all the comment spam I get, comment moderation is on and it may take awhile for your comment to show up.

Thanks for playing!

David