When I first started this project, I thought it was going to be a challenge to discuss a YA novel through Twitter; with Twitter, your posts have to be very succinct and under 140 characters, so I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to facilitate the kind of discussion I wanted.  However, as I read Sold, by Patricia McCormick, I found that I was able to create “tweets” that asked questions of my followers and prompted them to think about the book in terms of their own lives, an aspect of teaching instruction that I find is very important. As the semester progressed and I tweeted more and more, I found that from a teaching standpoint, Twitter was effective in encouraging student discussion of Sold.  Some of my fellow peers responded to my tweets, offering up their own thoughts to my questions or quotes from the book, and we were able to have a successful conversation via Twitter.

I would definitely use Twitter in my classroom someday.  I think the use of the Web 2.0 format instantly engages students and provides a fun outlet to explore literature.  I also think it’s effective for high school students because it encourages them to constantly edit and re-edit their work: when I was tweeting, I had to fit my thoughts into the 140 character limit, so I was constantly reworking my words to fit.  This caused me to think about what it was that I really wanted to say, and say it succinctly. This is a great tool for student writing.  One aspect of using Twitter in a classroom that I would have to ensure is that all students are using it and responding to the tweets; there were times during this project when not one person responded to the tweets, and throughout most of the semester, it seemed like the same four people were participating. I also would make sure everyone was reading the same book, because I think the fact that only one other person had read my book in the class hindered everyone else from really getting into the discussion.  I therefore had to keep my tweets somewhat generalized, which prevented me from getting into the ‘nitty-gritty’ of the text.