Twitter, student engagement, and feedback

It started out as a lesson on interest rates and exchange rates. It ended up as a lesson on interest rates and exchange rates, but the path through the lesson wasn't what I'd planned.

I posed two questions to the class, one a closed question, and the other a question demanding an explanation. It was a spur of the moment decision, as you do sometimes in teaching when your instinct says that you should try something, and I asked the boys to open up their Twitter app (either the Twitter web page, or Tweetdeck, as it turns out). They answered the closed question with a tweet, a warm up for Twitter as much as anything else, and then they had to Tweet the explanation of what they had just tweeted. The tweets were streamed live onto the whiteboard at the front of thew class (yes I still have a whiteboard at the front of the class, and yes the boys still sit at desks, in chairs - I'm so old fashioned..).

Here are a couple of tweets. I haven't shown the whole image as I wanted to make sure that I anonymised the tweets, so I had to screen shot to avoid each boy's name.

As the individual tweets appeared on the screen I gave each boy feedback on his response. The feedback was in the form of additional questions that might prompt them to edit and improve their tweets, which many did (just a touch of the old socratic questioning here, based largely on pushing boys through the SOLO thinking framework).We then repeated the exercise with an additional question.

Normally I'd have run a class discussion. Despite my practised skills in running class discussion, I would not have managed to get an individual explanation/answer from every boy. I asked them to put their hands up if they would have worked to stay under my radar in a class discussion - over half the hands went up.

What happened here? I managed to engage every boy in the class. What's more, I'd managed to give every boy individual feedback on his answer.

Hattie says:

"The aim is to provide feedback that is 'just in time', just for me', just for where I am in my learning process"

(Hattie, J 'Visible learning for teachers, maximising impact on learning', Page 122)

The feedback I'd given related to exactly where each boy's tweet suggested he was in his understanding of the issue at hand.

This felt like a 'pretty good day at the office'.