Thanks to @JesseSBlack and the team at http://www.getclassmate.com/ I tried a fantastic and innovative way of incorporating Twitter into a maths lesson. You can download the lesson plan and resources from http://www.getclassmate.com/newsletters/110925/

I teach a Prep, 1 & 2 grade, and incorporated this lesson with a small group Of grade 2 students. As the lesson plans provided by Get Classmate were aimed at older students I did modify it accordingly. At Level 2.0 in the VELS (Victorian Essential Learning Standards) students are expected to predict the outcome of chance events, such as the rolling of a die, using qualitative terms such as certain, likely, unlikely and impossible.

http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/support/progression/maths.html#lev2

I started the lesson the day before with a little groundwork, explaining to the students what I was going to do with the Twitter post so we could gather our data. I sent out a tweet- asking my followers – P, 1, 2 students would like to know ‘What is the chance of rain in your area today?’

I chose to include the hashtag #acpsmaths so all of the responses could be gathered together. I was a little worried in the beginning, unsure if we would get enough tweets to work with. Over a few hours I retweeted my original post using different educator hashtags including #edchat #comments4kids and #VicPLN to gather enough responses. There was no need to be worried as the powerful Twitter PLN was a success. We had plenty of Tweets to work with.

When it came time for the lesson to begin I used http://visibletweets.com/ and entered #acpsmaths to display the Tweets coming in. When we were doing our lesson introduction the tweets were popping up on the IWB, this was when I saw how enthusiastic and motivated the students were, they could not wait to get started! I basically followed the Get Classmate lesson plan, however, I wasn’t originally going to include the percentages as students are not not expected to know this at a grade 2 level, but many of the tweets coming in were giving us a percentage so I decided to discuss this throughout the lesson got the students to decide where the percentages would fit according to our chance of events terms we had already come up with.

All in all the kids loved it, I thought it was a success. I found it to be very rewarding and motivating and impressive to see students engrossed in real world learning. It was a fantastic way to incorporate Twitter and technology into what can sometimes be a overdone and dull lesson!

How have you or could you use Twitter in the classroom?