Twitter in Kindergarten

Hi there, it's Mrs. Lowe blogging today.

If you've been following this blog for a while you've probably noticed that we talk about Twitter a lot. Many people are surprised to find out that my kindergarten students have their own Twitter account. The Twitter account @MrsLowesClass was started 3 years ago and is on it's third set of student users.

When the year starts, it's mostly me tweeting about exciting things happening in our classroom and school. From there we tweet together as a class and finally students begin to write their own tweets (which are moderated by me before being published).

At the beginning of this week, I taught a few students in our class how to use the PicCollage app. Those students are now experts and are teaching other students. Using PicCollage, students are able to take photos and add text. They can modify their font, background colour and layout. They absolutely LOVE taking photos of their friends and things they have created in our classroom. They are also getting really good at stretching out sounds to record their thoughts as well.

Today we extended our learning by checking out our class Twitter account where I have been posting all of their PicCollage photos. I was amazed at how engaged the students were with reading their own tweets. Our class also follows a very small group of other people including Mrs. Hamm's class and Stevenson School.  Today we read a tweet about some Lego cats that another class had made. My students loved the photo and asked if we could send a message back. We all worked together to spell out our message! We even learned that we should add an /s/ to the end of the word if we are talking about more than one object (cat vs. many cats).

We have also begun to talk about safety. We noticed that we have 124 followers who read our tweets and we don't know all of them. For that reason, we never match a friend's picture with their name. We are learning to use "he" or "she" when we include a picture of a friend, so our readers won't know their name.

As we continue to use Twitter and other forms of social media we will learn many more authentic lessons about how to be safe and responsible digital citizens.

If you don't already "follow" us, please consider following @MrsLowesClass on Twitter! Then you can read all of our tweets live! In order to be safe, we only follow the accounts of other classrooms.