Offline @ Replies

// November 30th, 2009 // Comments // Twitterkids

The second day of our time teaching class 5 at Shepherds Jr. was on a Saturday.  We worked with the kids for 3 hours.  This was the first day we got internet and the kids we really excited! However, before the kids went online I did an activity with them to explain offline replies work in a very real way.  So we went outside and this is what it looked like.

Twitterkids – a brief look back

// November 12th, 2009 // Comments // Twitterkids

So we have returned from Tanzania and have been back for a week and a half and I’ve had some time to reflect on the trip and everything that it meant to me.  It was extremely fun and inspiring to work with the students at Shepherds Jr School.  However, it was more than just a fun time.  I have been working on twitterkids in New York City with middle school ESL students in Spanish Harlem for the past two years.  It was a long two years where no one recognized or appreciated the twitterkids curriculum.  The NYS school system is archaic and doesn’t understand the need or uses of the social web and could not appreciate the academic and social gains that the students achieved.   So for me to go across the world and bring this same curriculum to kids in Arusha and to work with a school that was open and accepting of this new type of teaching/learning was refreshing to say the least.

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for their support and encouragement while we were in Tanzania.  A lot of people have been asking about the curriculum, I will be posting it on this blog.  I am still sorting through all the wonderful video that AJ took and will but I will be posting the curriculum here bit by bit.  I am also going post a comprehensive edition of the curriculum as well.

Here is a video of the first day of teaching.  We talked about offline twitter status updates.  I felt it was important for the students to be familiar with the look and feel of twitter before they logged in.  I did not tell them this activity was for twitter we just did it as a stand alone activity.  Later when they logged into twitter for the first time they were able to make sense of the twitter stream they were seeing because it looked the the twitter stream we created in the classroom.

Twitter Kids Offline Updating from AJ Leon on Vimeo.