Teachers can use twitter too!

I just set up a twitter account. Wow - never thought I would be doing this! This mod definitely opened my eyes to Twitter's great benefits for teachers.

Twitter is a great tool for teachers to use to connect and dialogue with other teachers all over the globe. As an ESL teacher who is conducting observations in a high school setting, I am beginning to see that teachers can be greatly isolated from other staff. There only one ESL teacher in the entire high school and middle school! Therefore, the process of sharing ideas and techniques related to pedagogy can be difficult. On twitter, I am already following a EFT teacher from Valencia, Spain as well as a textbook/software company that designs materials for English language learners. Look at all the information and resources can can get from just these two, let alone the hundreds or thousands of other teachers on twitter.

Twitter can also be used to stay up to date with current ideas or techniques due to the nature of tweeting. You are supposed to post about what you are doing right this very instant. Reading books often contain concepts that are somewhat antiquated because of the reading, editing, and publishing process.

Kalinago English posted a great guide to twitter for teachers that introduces more indepth Twitter techniques such as talking to some with @ as well as some of the mannerisms when using twitter, like following people who follow you. Similarly, Jason Renshaw described #teachertuesday as a place to find innovative teachers who tweet.

To be or not to be... that is the quotation.

While setting up my Bloglines account, I found a very interesting article about using quotations in the ESL classroom. Nik's post entitled "Using Wise Quotes with ESL EFL students" about iWise that describes the functionality of this website. iWise is a site that compiles a large collection of quotations about various subject matters.

Teachers can use quotations in both simple or elaborate ways. Quotations could be a easy way to start or end a lesson on a particular subject or person; yet, they could be a essay starter where a student would have to agree or disagree with the quote and state way. I also like that you can listen to the quotes. This is a good way for ESL students to become familiar with different accents, speaking styles, and intonation.

What I like about Nik's blog post is that he lists some weakness of this website, such as the abstractness of some of the quotations. It's quite easy to find all the components that we like about different classroom tools, but finding weakness can be difficult. Having a critical eye of web tools is a good way to determine their practicality in the classroom.