When the Newspapers in Education program stopped delivering the Vancouver Sun and The Province to my school 3 years ago, I was forced to find a new way “to do my day.” Previously, I had always had the students in my now defunct Alternate program, do a daily '"Humanities" assignments about current events. They would come in first thing, grab a paper, along with a snack, a smoothie or a tea and read. There was always an expectation to “do something” with the information that was being read. I found out early in my Alternate career that a certain amount of predictability was a must. The structured yet individualized nature of this Current Events activity completely lowered anxiety levels and allowed many of my students to leave the messiness of their lives behind and transition more effectively into their life at school.
As for personal accountability: Often times I would have students hand in a summary piece of writing that included a personal response. Sometimes though, they were to read the paper individually preparing to later share orally to the group an interesting piece of news. Other times my 2 EA's and I would take small groups of kids and alternately read articles out loud working on reading fluency and then to discuss what was read to check for comprehension etc. The students balked at first but as the year progressed they really got into it and their reading and writing drastically improved. There were the "teachable moments" too where current events could be related back to history or used as a jump off for math or nutrition lessons. It worked so well. I LOVED it! And then it was gone...
Now what? Go online was a natural next step. The problem was that students were used to Facebook experiences and had to be taught how to “search the web” for appropriate information and “news worthy” articles. Even so, I found that many of them would get lost down the Rabbit Hole that can be the Internet and end up taking FOREVER to find a suitable article! Then "Enter Stage Right" - Twitter.
http://bit.ly/1Fd9PM0
But alas, my assignment changed. But - I still use Twitter to help support students who are in my Senior Supportive Learning (SSL) class. I have some students in “protected” English and Math classes where I am responsible for designing activities to lead them through prescribed outcomes but I also have to support other students who come into my room to get help to understand and complete the work for all of their other mainstream classes. Some students have one block in the room, others as much as 4 blocks (out of a Day 1, Day 2, 8-block linear rotation). Continuing to integrate online technology, I have moved much of the “assigned work” to the CANVAS Learning Management System as a result of the work I did in OLTD 504 with Avi Luxenburg, but am in the process of figuring out a way to have IFTTT curate my Twitter finds that I want specifically targeted to the group of students in my English blocks. (See the instructional video I created using Snagit below).