Nick Davis (@Slapshot99) has started a weekly Twitter challenge for teachers to post pics along a certain theme. You can see pics that have been submitted by searching for #teacherswithcameras on Twitter. Last week (the first in the series) had the theme of “Play.” For this week, Nick is looking for Black and White pictures. Don’t forget to include the hashtag of #teacherswithcameras when you tweet your pic so we can all see your creative ideas!
#gmttc is the official hashtag for the Global Math Task Twitter Challenge. Classrooms around the world are invited to participate by solving the problems that are tweeted and/or tweeting out their own. You can formally sign on to be a #gmttc tweeter on this spreadsheet, but this is not a requirement. It is easy enough to find recently tweeted tasks for your grade level by doing a search for #gmttc with your grade level number at the end. For example, #gmttc4 will provide you with recent 4th grade challenges.
I enjoy seeing the variety of images students use to present the math problems, and your students will begin to make connections between what they are learning compared to students in other parts of the world. This is a quick, no fuss way to “flatten the classroom.” As a whole-class, center, or extension activity, #gmttc is a fun idea to help students get excited about math!
So, traditionally, Fridays are what I call Phun Phridays – when I blog about something that pretty much has no educational value. But I’m tired of called them Phun Phridays. So I used an online Scrabble dictionary to help me find something more realistically alliterative. The new name is – drum roll, please!!!! – Frivolous Fridays!
For today’s Frivolous Friday Find, I am grateful to The Bloggess, whose site never fails to make me laugh but is definitely NSFW – particularly if the workplace happens to be a public elementary school.
Anyway, The Bloggess shared, “That Can Be My Next Tweet!” which gathers information from your Twitter feed to generate random tweets that could be complete nonsense or surprise you with startling depth. The best ones are those that do both. I included a few of the suggestions it compiled from my feed below:
If you really have nothing better to do, you can also put in other people’s Twitter names. Like famous people. You know. Famous people who Tweet a lot. Here’s a scientific study you could try: If someone always tweets nonsense, does the random tweet generator from their Twitter feed actually make sense? I’ll let you figure that out…
Testing week.
Ugh.
Stressful.
Depressing.
NOT fun.
So, why not join us in a light-hearted Twitter chat using memes to discuss education?
Everyone is invited!
It’s tonight (Tuesday, April 21st, 2015) at 8 PM CST. #NEISDPLN
Here are the questions:
1. Haters gonna hate – what’s something you hear educators complain about too often?
2. Grumpy Cat – How do you deal with the grumpy cats you encounter in your job?
3. Facepalm or Epic Fail – What is a teaching mistake you made that you’ve since corrected?
4. Like a Boss – What are the ideal features of an administrator?
5. 1st World Problems – What are “problems” in our education system that other countries might find silly?
6. Charlie Bit Me – What’s the funniest thing a student has said in your class (and you wish you had video of it)?
I know you were testing today, and it’s exhausting. But, look on the bright side – you don’t have any papers to grade tonight!
It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be EPIC. Do you want to be this guy:
or these guys:
The choice is yours!
A couple of weeks ago some of the librarians in our district sent out an idea for a district Twitter chat for our students. They included a great form that we could use for the students to fill out. I had just participated in a professional chat a few days before, hosted by Todd Nesloney, about creating a positive school culture. In fact, Todd’s recent #EduLS challenge was to celebrate someone. So, the third prompt on the Twitter sheet appealed to me, “Give a Shout Out to a Teacher!”
As the GT teacher, I have students from all grade levels, so I thought this would be a great opportunity for my classes to perform a random act of kindness for potentially every staff member in the school.
My younger students dictated their Tweets to me, while older students wrote their own and then tweeted them from our class account once I approved them.
Knowing that not many teachers follow our class account, I’ve been collecting the Tweets in Storify each day, and mailing the link to the teachers included in that day’s accolades. All of the students were allowed to choose who got the shout outs, and most of them chose to recognize two or three staff members each.
I am trying to encourage the students to name something specific they remember about the person, rather than just saying, “You’re nice.” It’s been gratifying to see that they are happy to include all staff members – not just classroom teachers.
I want to thank Irene Kistler(@IreneKistler) and Sara Romine (@laffinglibrary) for spreading this idea. I believe Irene is the author of Twitter Paper. When I asked her if I could share the idea, she pointed me to a very cool website that inspired her. It is called KidsEdChatNZ, and has fabulous prompts for their New Zealand student participants each week.
It appears that the New Zealand chat happens at a weekly scheduled time. However, I think that doing this as a “slow chat” was great so that we could get more participants.
If you are interested, you might also want to check out the “S.C.A.M.P.E.R.” Twitter Chat with students that we did in February.
Just to be clear from the outset, this post is not about the game that prepares you for a career in Cirque de Soleil – or, in my case, a long stay in the hospital.
Twister, basically a fake Tweet generator, is one of the many fun tools available from ClassTools.net. (Check out this post from Richard Byrne about Connect Fours, another really cool ClassTools resource.)
ClassTools is the site that also brings you Fakebook. (You can probably easily deduce the purpose of that tool!) I’ve used Fakebook, and included it as one of the challenges on Brad Gustafson’s ConnectED Bingo Board. Joelle Trayers has a great post about using Fakebook with Junie B. Jones, and reading her post reminded me that I had been wanting to explore some of the other Classtools resources.
Twister is very simple to use. You can see the required fields in the picture below.
The tool actually pulls images from the internet to use for a background, so I tried a fictional character, Harry Potter, to see what would happen. Here is what I got when I submitted:
Then I thought I should try something more historical.
This tool is easy to use and probably works for any famous person, fictional or historical, on the internet.
If you want something a bit more complex, you can try out this downloadable fake Twitter template. Or, for a simulated Twitter experience, try Tammy Tang’s awesome Google Class Tweeter Template.