Comment guide

Inspired by Comments4Kids, I am planning to start having my students leave comments on blogs written by people outside of our school building.

This will be a pretty exciting next-step for my students and their blogging project.

Before we start doing that, we will have to revisit our expectations for leaving a comment. Hopefully they will recall our classroom discussions around leaving comments. We talked a lot about how sometimes our comments are the only way we are known on a blog or on the internet. We need to think about what kind of impression we are making when we leave comments.

Here is what we use for our commenting expectations.

Commenting Guide

Pertinent It should connect to the original post, or original comment.
Positive You want to encourage the author.
Purposeful Only leave a comment when you have something to say.
Professional Use your best writing conventions - capitalization, punctuation, spelling, etc.

Twitter

I've been using Twitter for some time now. I don't really remember when I started, but it was around this past spring. For the first few months, I only used it to follow people and randomly update my few followers with useless information.

Really useless information. Like where I was or what I was eating (especially while I was in Hawaii for summer vacation) or how the weather was. Very boring stuff.

Then in the fall, I discovered that I could use Twitter to help my profession. I could use Twitter to connect with other educators and engage in thoughtful and productive discussions on popular topics. I was able to find resources that others have been using successfully for years. In turn, I was able to share what I had found with my colleagues.

Now, I am attempting to show some of those colleagues how to tweet themselves. I've tried to collect some of the best Twitter tips and start up guides here.

Resources

Twitter Handbook for Teachers This is a good place to start. It reads like the missing Twitter users guide for beginners. It also have a few FAQs at the end and can also be printed out for quick reference.

Sue Waters' Twitter Wiki A wiki devoted to the importance of PLNs (Professional Learning Networks) and how to get started.

100 Twitter Tools for Teachers Organized nicely into several categories: Managing Twitter, Finding Friends, Sharing, Games, News & Research, Twitterers, Groups, Organization & Productivity, Integration & Classroom Tools.

Twitter Links for Educators Complete with links to PLNs to get you started.