I came into it all fairly skeptically. After all, Twitter is not a forum meant for deep thought. You can type messages that are a maximum of 140 characters or about 28 words. It’s a format that lends itself to fleeting thoughts like, “Roast beef for supper,” or “My students sure worked hard today” rather than thought provoking commentary.

That said, I think I’m hooked on Twitter because I’ve discovered that it is a place where learning can occur.  Over the past few weeks I’ve managed to find  a couple of dozen educators and other people (and three NASA missions) that are all giving short, snappy updates on whatever they’re doing. These people are doing interesting things. They may not all report every day, but they’re all involved in pedagogically interesting projects. As they give updates of what they’re doing (and often links to posted projects), I’m learning and getting ideas.

Not all the people I’ve selected have worked out well. I dropped one guy who is not posting about the interesting stuff he is doing in his class (and other sources say he is doing really neat stuff), but seems to be continually posting messages (tweets) about his breakfast, returning from the airport, or other minutiae of his life. While I’m sure these are fascinating details for some people, I don’t know him and learning about his breakfast doesn’t help me learn.

That said, I’m learning to post snippets that might help other educators. Evaluating your own tweets with a view as to whether anyone might care is a bit humbling. I think I’ve said a few interesting things in the past couple of weeks, but I’m not posting a lot just because I don’t want to bore people. After all, does anyone really care what I had for breakfast? (I went to McDonald’s and had the breakfast burrito, if you do care.)

Twitter can be an opportunity to be vain or voyeuristic, but it can also unite a lot of professionals or friends and give an opportunity for learning or quickly helping others out with a problem.

I’m a fan of Twitter.

Unfortunately for the kids, old newspapers aren’t indexed and the search engine on one of the two sites we used is, well, inefficient would be the kindest thing you could say about it. This means you need to know the date of the event you’re researching, and you need to read through a lot of articles in quite a few newspapers in order to find the fairly small amount of information you need to do the assignment. It takes quite a bit of time. It’s annoying, but research is like that sometimes.

This presented quite a challenge for my students who can’t recall a time when Google couldn’t give them instant answers. After poking around in the newspapers for about 10 minutes, they claimed they couldn’t find anything and started trying to search the wider Web in order to (unsuccessfully) find appropriate newspaper articles or (worse yet) secondary sources.

As a guy who studied history and spent endless hours reading rolls of microfilm in dimly lit library rooms, I was surprised by the kids’ reaction until it occurred to me that they’ve probably never had this problem before. They’ve never had to carefully examine document after document to find one elusive answer. Examining countless documents takes a lot of patience, and that may be one thing that the easy access to instant information has taken away from them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m endlessly fascinated by the possibilities that the Internet offers education. Yet to give easy and quick answers too often seems to have limited the patience of at least a few of my 16 year old students. While that might not matter too much in school, there are endless occasions in life when you need to patiently sift for an answer, whether that’s correcting a minor error in you programming code, or interviewing applicant after applicant to find just the right teacher or pastor. You need to be able to search intensely, moving slowly, and not getting frustrated.

Immediate access to all the knowledge on the planet offers a lot, but it takes a bit away, too.

I’ve only tried a few pages, but the summary does seem pretty good. How well this website may summarize your pages probably depends a lot of how well written they were, but you’re probably not having your students learn from really disorganized websites anyways.

If this site works as well as my initial tests, it should be really useful helping weaker students glean information, or even stronger students working with material that’s a bit above their heads.

I’m looking for an excuse to play with this site.

Fair? Probably not, but it does happen, and, as our principal pointed out, you need to be really careful. As teachers (and especially as Christian school teachers) we’re moral examples to the kids so both our professional and personal lives need to be in good order in case someone happens to notice how we live. Whether that seems fair or not, it’s reality and part of the job if you choose to become a teacher. You’ve got to live with it.

The other side of the equation, which I don’t think we really covered enough, is that social networking has a lot of power. I’ve noticed that through blogging, hanging out at Classroom 2.0 and “following people on Twitter, I’ve become an observer (and even someone with whom to share ideas) of some of the most creative classroom computer users in the world.

This kind of networking is only possible with Internet social networking. Social networking certainly has dangers when used frivolously (in the way many people use Facebook or MySpace) but can become a very powerful tool when used well.

I think the trick is not to stop the kids from using sites like Facebook, but to show them how. They need to understand not only the dangers, but also the potential. You have to be careful about letting out personal information, yet you can also make some incredible contacts.

It’s a balancing act. Without the risks, you don’t get the rewards.

Like Kevin suggests, using Google Sites is a dead simple way to create a simple website. It allows for collaboration between users with Google accounts and by doing that it acts as a pretty impressive wiki. If you use Google Sites within Google Apps all your Apps users can be automatically added as users of your Sites (which is pretty cool in a geeky kind of way).

Basically, I’m just looking for an excuse to use Google Sites and I think I have one next month lined up when I cover databases with my class. If it works, I’ll let you know.

My approach forces me to move from lecturing to a more inquiry or discovery learning approach. Computers are an ideal tool to accomplish that. You can ask leading questions, give places or approaches for the kids to find the answers, and pretty soon your students will find out what they need to know without you having to stand up in the front and force them to take notes.

If you do like to lecture (and, let’s be honest, all of us do like to hear ourselves talk to at least a certain degree), computers aren’t that useful.

Could this be at least part of the reason why so many high school teachers are slow to adopt computers in their lessons?

Yet for all the slickness of the affair, I was struck by how my students responded to it and how they responded to my class on Remembrance. I had only two pictures in class and a good handful of stories to illustrate why the Canadians fought in the Second World War and who they fought to help. Aside from the light illuminating the room, I used no technology at all.

I think they were a little jaded by the school’s official Remembrance ceremony. They’d been there and done that. Yet in class a simple story still gets the kids’ attention. No glitz, no glamor, just a few stories. It didn’t hurt that one of them was the story of my dad remembering the Canadian soldiers arriving in his village when he was five years old. The personal, and especially the immediately personal, will win out over glitz and glamor every time.

Technology in the class is a wonderful thing, and I’m completely hooked on it, but sometime I have to force myself to remember that less is really more.

Michele Martin summarized it neatly (along with help from Tom Peters and Seth Godin): Blogging helps you organize your thoughts in a succinct way and then gives you the opportunity to present those same thoughts to the world. If you get good at it some people may actually read what you have to say. If people aren’t yet reading you, then the exercise of blogging helps you to learn how to think intelligently and present your case clearly.

In a world where vacuous T.V., empty election slogans and promises, and mindless video games occupy much of the mental power of even some of the most intelligent people I know, it’s hard to come up with a better reason to blog.