So I tried using Twitter in the classroom yesterday.  I set up one account on the class set of iPods and projected the account from Tweetdeck on my computer.  I put an initial prompt from “Macbeth” wondering whether or not he should kill Duncan.  This was a senior college prep class, the first two classes tweeted individually and I asked the third class to do it within their groups.  Overall it went well.  There were some issues to figure out: 40 students tweeting at once overloading our system.  We quickly found the limitations of Twitter- they only allow a certain amount of loads into the iPods (refreshing to see what everyone else is writing)- it is a good thing we were using Tweetdeck so we could see everyone’s comments up front.  Surprisingly, Twitter held up pretty well- the students must have tweeted 300 times and there was no problem with that.

Some things I might try next time:  Set up the girls as Lady Macbeth and the boys as Macbeth- have a debateable prompt and let them go at it.  Another thing is to keep it at group or even partner responses to limit the number of tweets- it was hard to follow all the students at once.

Some students signed up for Twitter right there in class and followed our class account.  There were only a couple of students who already had Twitter accounts.  I can’t decide whether to officially recommend they get Twitter accounts or not.