I’m sure it has been said a million times over but I will gladly say it again: Teacher Twitter (I refuse to say or write the word eduTwitter – sorry) is a powerful vehicle through which to drive forward your own teaching and, if you are a leader, your department/school’s. It is a wonderful resource and here is just a tiny reason as to why…
This was a tweet from me earlier this year.
I’ll be honest – back then, I had made the resource but had no structured way to use it. So during 2018-19 I was using it (in the form of small laminated cards) on a very ad hoc basis – very haphazardly!
I would sometimes get them out with Year 13 at the end of lessons (and never with Year 12), or use them as key terms in a quick test at the start of lessons and sometimes even laid them on tables and then didn’t get around to using or even talking about them…
Then along came David’s tweet (@DavidAlcock1) earlier this month as part of the amazing weekly @GeogChat!
My approach on Twitter is usually to ‘Like’ things I find interesting then come back to them later (and this whole exercise deserves a whole blog post in and of itself!), but I knew I had to ‘jump on’ this very quickly. Below is part of the email I sent to the other A-Level teacher in my department a week or so after seeing the tweet, having trialled this approach already:
This is all very much in its nascent stage and I don’t want to sit here and wax lyrical about it too much but what needs to be stressed is how amazing the sharing of ideas on Twitter is. I had something, I then picked up something from David, tweaked it a little bearing in mind what works for me in my context and my students – and VOILÀ!
I thought Year 12 liked it, but then Year 13 came along and smashed it! As a whole, KS5 really engaged well with it and although we usually have some great discussions, the vocab on the cards ensured everyone was challenging themselves. If you want to use the cards yourself then please feel free.
Abdurrahman Pérez (@mr_perez5)
October 2019 (reposted in Oct 2021)