Using twitter with my students and their parents

Twitter is a very easy to use site for communicating with parents and students. I have decided to trial using twitter for this purpose – if you would like to see what I'm doing, you can follow @MrHarnwell. I decided that it would be best to create a new separate account (to the one I already use - @jharnwell), so that parents and students aren't bombarded by things that they are not interested in.

So, letting parents know when the next assessment task will be, what the days homework was, or what we did in class will be as simple as entering a 140 character tweet. But, having to load up http://www.twitter.com/ or tweetdeck could get annoying. Thankfully Tech hit have created an outlook plugin: http://www.techhit.com/TwInbox/twitter_plugin_outlook.html. Now, I can tweet straight from outlook. It also allows me to see tweets from within outlook.

The best thing is that parents do not need a twitter account, nor do they need to log in to a particular website - and it is very easy to update!

The other main advantage of this, is that it provides another avenue for parents to request information about curriculum and have input into the teaching and learning process.