Twitter and School

You want current events?

You can't get any more current than Twitter.

How Cool: First hand accounts of Arab Spring, SCOTUS decisions, legislative debate, The Pope Tweeting in Latin

How Ridiculous: Anything that comes from Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes, Johnny Manziel or the Kardashian clan

Incredible stuff is happening on Twitter alongside really dumb and inappropriate stuff. Our job needs to be teaching our students how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

When have we ever as a society been able to contribute - in real time - to a national debate and create trends from such a grassroots perspective? Do we need to march on Washington DC anymore? Or do we just need enough retweets to be trending on Twitter and have one of the major media outlets pick us up?

Think of the power of 140 characters.

We need - as educators of citizenship - to teach our students how to harness this power for positive change. It can be done and TechBytes has created an interesting graphic showing a Bloom's Taxonomy approach to Twitter (See above).

See also Clay Shirky's TED Talk on "How Social Media Can Make History."