Using Smartphones & Twitter to Support Learning

One of the most powerful tools afforded by modern smartphones is the ability to take a picture and upload it onto twitter to share, almost instantaneously. This functionality, the backbone of social media, is also very useful in the classroom. That picture can become available within moments, either displayed on a screen in the classroom, or on everyone else’s phones using a hashtag. This is an excellent way of sharing information quickly and having it available for discussion.

We started the year with our grade 8s by holding a workshop on Thinking Skills. One of the exercises revolved around getting the girls to find objects around the school that filled them with “wonderment and awe” and photograph it with their cameras and use a twitter hashtag to post it in a form where they could show an entire grade packed into the school hall what they had found. This combination…