I was conversing with an editor the other day, wondering why her company did not use twitter to communicate with readers. She said “Twitter is just a fad.”

I didn’t say anything. But, I did think back to a time many years ago when I requested a friend get on email so we could communicate that way and he said “No thanks. The internet is just a fad.” Fail!

It also kind of reminded me of the time (probably around 1984) when I told people (chest puffed out) “I’ll never own a personal computer!”

What is Twitter and Why?

Five million people buying a hula-hoop is a fad. 75,000,000+ people and businesses on twitter, sharing information and communicating in real-time is a movement.

I will freely admit that my initial reaction to twitter was essentially the same as almost everyone else’s–”what the heck good is it?” I mean you are limited to a maximum of 140 characters (that’s why is is called “microblogging”). But I decided to give it a try and I am now convinced of its usefulness.

I follow Wired (@WIRED) Scientific American (@sciam), Science News (@sciencenewsorg), New Scientist (@newscientist) , Nature Biotechnology (@naturebiotech), The National Math and Science Initiative, (@NMSI), Teacher Magazine (@teachermagazine), Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki), Dan Schawbel (@DanSchawbel), Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself), Bruce Sterling (@bruces) and others.

These are people and organizations that are interesting to me and feed me information that I both want and need. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s inspirational. If I am not interested in what they have to offer at any particular time I just ignore it. No big deal.

Here at Challenger Middle School, Team 724 is engaged in a Twitter experiment. If you have a student on Team 724, send me an email and I’ll tell you how to follow us. It’s easy, it’s fun, and it’s the most up-to-date way to keep up with what is going on during the school day.

I recommend using Firefox with the Echofon extension for a seamless and convenient twitter experience. I’ve heard that TweetDeck might be a good way to go. Of course you can always use the twitter website if all else fails. Below you see a screen capture of what the team 724 timeline looked like at the end of the day on February 10, 2010 . This is only a part of the timeline. You’d have to scroll down on the real thing to see the previous posts.

Echofon view of the team timeline

Give it a whirl, you might just get converted, have a lot of fun, and learn a bunch of amazing things all at the same time.

(Caren Litherland)

I think it will be beneficial if I set out some guidelines for the students to keep in mind as they write and post to their blogs. I am open to suggestions or clarifications. Here they are.

• No insults or attacks on other people
• Must use proper grammar and punctuation
• No making fun of anyone
• No threats
• Do not pretend to be insane
• No joking about hurting people
• No foul language
• No posting of copyright material (text, pictures, video, etc.) without permission from the copyright owner
• If you use pictures or other objects that are in the public domain or are used under a Creative Commons (CC) license, you must give credit to the owner of the material, and provide a link back to the original (like I did when using the CC-licensed photo from Flickr in this post)

You can post as often as you want. Some good topics for blog posts include:

• A subject you know a lot about
• Hobbies
• World events
• Sports
• Local news
• What’s going on in your neighborhood
• Pets
• Books you are reading
• Product reviews (only if you are very familiar with a particular product)
• TV shows
• Movies you have seen
• Games
• How-to do something

Those are just a few ideas.