Tweeting

We love Twitter.  In a survey of my class this week, 18 out of a class of 20 said they preferred tweeting to blogging.  Perhaps it’s because last week, we had tons of fun as we added daily tweets to a story that we started about an alien.  The story began with two words, L’extraterrestre… and from there it grew into quite a comical adventure.  On Thursday, the students were battling back and forth in French on Twitter making the alien die, only to be resurrected by some ingenious means.  In fact, they would have kept it up all class, if I hadn’t interjected to get them working on review for a test this week.  In addition to our story, we have been answering questions that we are receiving from an elementary immersion class in Ontario.  This has been very useful as these students are sending us questions with language structures that we are learning.  For example, the interrogative word “laquelle” was used in a question about our favorite colors and another was the future tense verb form which grade 11s are currently learning and the 12s are reviewing.  Here’s a question we received: “Si tu peux inviter quelqu’un fameux à dîner qui sera t-il/elle?”   What famous person will you invite to dinner? This will tie in well when we learn the conditional form as well.  This question was motivating to the students and they eagerly tweeted off their response in French.  I love it, because I am able to provide feedback immediately as the tweets are sent out using Hootsuite on my Smart Board.  One issue, we are having, is the French accents are accessed differently on all the devices we are using.  The class computer uses ALT+ numbers, my Mac uses a French keyboard, and some of the mobile devices that students are bringing require them to hold down the letter until the proper character is displayed.  This is leading to some students not putting in the accents.  Does anyone have any suggestions for solving this issue?  This week we are sending out tweets that review vocabulary and language structures that will be on Thursday’s test.  Follow our hashtag #phssF and send us a Tweet.

Blogging

For the two students who prefer blogging to tweeting, they appreciate the reflection and the pace of blogging.  It doesn’t have to be done so instantaneously as Twitter.  They prefer to write down what they want to say and then have me check it and once it is revised, they want to add a post to the blog.  They also like to read the comments that we have received so far and to take a couple of days to figure out a response.   These two students in general tend to be more reflective and quiet.

It is interesting to see the differences in students’ reactions to tweeting and blogging.  In my opinion, each of these technologies favors particular human characteristics.  If I had to describe the characteristics I’ve noticed among my students while using these mediums, they would have to be:

Tweeting :  active, speedy, laconic, and lighthearted

Blogging: reflective, patient, thorough