Material Detail

I completely agree with the statement made in this lesson plan that faculty and administration should become aware of how well social networking tools and technology can work in a classroom. There is data which we have seen that supports this idea and somehow should make it clearer for it to become part of the curriculum in any learning content. This lesson plan does an excellent job at achieving the goal of promoting the use of technology in the classroom, more specifically Twitter.

There are a couple of things that I enjoy the most about this lesson plan. First, I like the idea of working collaborately, both students and teachers. Under, the UDL Guidelines, this promote socialization and can stablish a better learning environment. This strategy is also a good way to model for your students since eventually the goal is for them to participate and becoming "Followers" on twitter. Second, the objectives are clearly met by the end of the lesson plan. The main objective being to have all involved parties gaining quality knowledge about twitting and eventually used to improve the student's learning experiences. Third, I feel that this lesson plan does a great job at having teachers reflect on their own knowledge of technology. It gives them a chance to improve on it and use to improve their own teaching methods. Overall this is a wonderful lesson plan that can be used for any content or curriculum. Once it is put into practice with students it will be a successful experience.

Technical Remarks:

This is a great Lesson plan to get teachers exposed and experienced in using one of the most ubiqitous social networking tools of our age: Twitter.  Good scaffolding is provided for those teachers who are not comfortable using the tool through an initial group approach, encouraging teachers to discover the basics of the tool together.  As they get more comfortable, the focus shifts towards more individual work.

The focus on building community around tech tools is laudible and should go well given that the author is an administrator.

A suggestions for improvement could be to include a rubric that clearly indicates what constitutes success.  Possible inclusions could be number of tweets sent, number of twitter friends followed and so on.

Another possibility would be to target a specific conference of interest and have teachers follow the hashtag to create exposure to this method of Professional Learning.

Technical Remarks: