Yesterday I decided I’d inject a little bit of digital citizenship and connectedness into my grade 9 geography class. We were talking about ecological footprints, so in class I logged into my @ODSSUnger twitter account and sent two tweets. We composed the tweets together (OK, I did it, but I did it in front of them and got their input) in class.
The first one was fairly general: “My gr9 geog class wants to know what you do to reduce your ecological footprint #UngerCGC1P” This is not my PLN twitter account, and I only have 43 followers (most of which are Orangeville businesses that just follow anyone/everyone in Orangeville with a twitter account), so I also retweeted it on my PLN twitter account hoping for more feedback.
One response to this tweet was
From this we were able to discuss how this would help reduce his footprint. How many different areas this would affect of his footprint. We also talked about how this would be possible in the winter months. The class seemed to think he must have a greenhouse whereas I thought he likely froze or canned his produce. So we tweeted him back to see. We will (hopefully) look at his response on Monday.
We also sent a tweet to our Mayor Adams:
This was good in terms of giving the class something to talk about that was local. Which one they thought was most significant, what each meant and how it affected our footprint and land use.
I appreciated that the students could see what we were talking about in class was something that other people were thinking about and focused on.
The added bonus was in a couple replies to Mayor Adams’ tweet.
These two tweets allowed us to discuss point of view and bias. We looked at the profiles of each of the people and discussed how their backgrounds and professions may affect their view. This was all outside of my "lesson plan" but really got the students thinking and discussing with real life examples.
Since then there has been a discussion between Mayor Adams and Chris Halliday on twitter that I can’t wait to show my class. I love that asking a fairly simple question on behalf of my geography class has blossomed into an interesting discussion that has moved beyond my room, but that my students still get to see it.
This little experiment of mine resulted in a few different good discussions and teachable moments that would not have happened had I not reached out beyond my class.
We got to talk about what I thought were good twitter etiquette guidelines. And as a class we wrote thank-you tweets to the people who responded.
I am thinking about getting the students to do a little side research about the EAB issue and what the students think the town should do about an arborist.
This is not something I have tried before, but feel fairly good about how it went and will try again.
What have you done to bring “real world” examples into your class?
What bonus ‘teachable moments’ have you had this week?And if you would like to share how you've reduced your ecological footprint please tweet to @ODSSUnger and use #UngerCGC1P. Thanks!
