If imitation is the greatest form of flattery then many in my world should be hugely flattered. An education professor once told one of my methods classes to "shamelessly appropriate teaching ideas wherever possible". I have done my best to be true to that charge. One such story follows . . . .
This weekend while chatting with my Millennial daughter the subject of Twitter came up, to my consternation she admitted not following my feed, shockingly she admitted not even having a Twitter account at all. This led to much eye rolling on my wife's part, not that she was upset about my lack of followers. Rather she was upset that a phone call that was nearing a conclusion now had new life as I launched into the reasons a young emerging professional needed to plug into the Twitter-sphere.
As I extolled my daughter on the value of mining professional information and crowd sourcing work related questions in 140 characters or less she casually mentioned a fellow graduate student who is Teaching English as a Second Language and using Twitter in her classroom.
(In the interest of full credit and attribution this idea comes from my daughter's friend Fran, or perhaps Jan. At any rate, full credit belongs to Fran/Jan or whoever she stole it from- it was not my idea. Now with a clear copyright conscious here goes.)
Fran/Jan assigns her ESL students English reading passages and the following writing assignment is to Tweet a response to the passage. The result is a conciseness of response that requires her students exercise careful writing and is relatively quick to review/correct to assure reading compliance. Brilliant!
To all the Teachers who already figured this out I tip my hat. To Fran/Jan if this was a truly original idea I freely assign all rights and royalties. To the rest of you I never promised much, as I anxiously await some clear concise commentary on this reading passage.
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