Perhaps the most popular idea to come out of my Signposting Progress work at Berkhamsted School’s Teaching, Learning and Assessment Conference was the ‘Tweet My Lesson’ idea. Inspired by Historical Tweets, it was popular because it taps into the students’ knowledge of social platforms, it adheres to Dave Keeling’s RING – Relevant, Interesting, Naughty and a Giggle – principle. Even better, it needs absolutely NO preparation on the teacher’s part in checking progress.
This simple little strategy works like this as described in my Signposting Progress workshop booklet –
The Twitter formula can be applied to a plenary task to summarise student learning and progress. Ask students to write a tweet to summarise what they have learnt in your lesson. A tweet comprises of a message of 140 characters, which includes spaces and punctuation. They can also use hashtags and @ symbols. Of course, students are very familiar with writing in this way and can be extremely creative in their tweets.
Not only can this activity be used to summarise a student’s progress but it can be used as an empathetic exercise in which students can image themselves as a historical figure, for example, at a particular point. So for example, William has just won the Battle of Hastings, he gets his iphone out and goes onto Twitter – what would he write?
In lessons, I just have to ask students to write the subheading ‘Tweet My Lesson’ and they automatically know what to do unless I have add a twist and ask themselves to image themselves as a historical figure.
A wonderful short exercise which not only summarises student progress but also, if used regularly can help construct a learning dialogue in exercise books.