Micro-Overload?

After reading a few of the articles on microblogging I became a bit torn on what to think. On one hand, I was really impressed with the possibilities of digital storytelling and how it could be used to get students reading and writing in the ELA classroom without having to stare mindlessly at a Folger Shakespeare book. Students are able to compose in so many ways beyond the traditional pen and paper that it is a necessity to invite digital literacy into the classroom. I can think of so many uses for microblogging in the classroom: writing tweets in the voice of major characters for whatever text is being read, keeping up to date with new technology and what's happening in educational communities across the world, having classroom twitter-pals instead of the old fashioned pen-pals, creating classroom Twitter accounts to keep parents and absent students up-to-date. One thing that I like best about Twitter is the brief character limit, I think this would be extremely useful in the ELA classroom to help take away the intimidation factor that many struggling writers face. Perhaps an assignment of writing tweets would be more accessible to some students than writing an essay or research paper but they would still be able to demonstrate their knowledge effectively.

As much as I love learning about all of these things and hope to incorporate them into my future classroom, this article on academic tweeting addressed the concerns I have about all of this. I think there's an extreme danger in taking all of these things that students enjoy, and learn from, and making them "just school". One way to avoid that is to not bombard students with these new things. During student teaching I made the assumption that of course all my students were using blogs and MySpace and Facebook and tried to incorporate them into my lessons. First lesson I learned: never assume and the second lesson I learned: there is no "everyone" using "everything", especially when it comes to adolescents.  As educators we have to truly think about why we are incorporating these things into our classrooms and ensure that we are using them in meaningful and purposeful ways, not simply using them for the sake of using them. I would hope that we wouldn't teach a text just because "everybody was reading it" and we should be careful to approach technology the same way.