As I spent the weekend reflecting on the use of Twitter and Kidblog in my French classroom, I realized Twitter has surpassed my expectations for usefulness.  In the beginning, I had rallied my class around the idea of using Twitter to practice, each day, a French phrase, using some verb tense or other language structure from our daily class work.  This was so much fun in the first week that we had people wanting to join in or follow suit in their classrooms.

Last week, I used Twitter to tweet out our blog URL and to invite people to comment. Using Twitter, for this purpose, worked magic.  We went from 0-14 comments in two days.  We also had people retweeting our blog information and we have one teacher (@willgourley) inviting us to continue a Twitter chat in French with his immersion class (@Chapman6s).

This week, I thought we could tweet out a creative story to which we all add one line at a time.  We will see where this goes.  The students are enjoying seeing their posts tweeted out and mentioned in class, as I begin each day by checking into our Twitter stream, #phssF.

Thanks to the power of Twitter, our blogging became way more exciting last week.  We had people reading and posting comments from Edmonton, Toronto, Victoria, and Melbourne, Australia.  A few of my students jumped at the opportunity to communicate with the teacher in Australia.  It is great to see the students enthusiastic about using their French to connect with others outside the class.