1. 1) Establish a Twitter account just for your teaching. One can establish as many Twitter accounts as one has email addresses (free Gmail accounts can help with this). I use an account just for my teaching (@holamrschurch) that is separate from the personal Twitter handle, to stay connected with the social and professional communities that are important to me. Students are also encouraged to create dedicated class personae to tweet from (though they can include mention of their personal Twitter account on their class Twitter account bio, in case people want to find out more about them). This way, class participants can follow their peers without having to worry about reading through irrelevant tweets. 2) Choose a hash tag that works for your class or subject area. For my class, I chose #WakelandEnEspañol.Using a hash tag made it easy for anyone who wished to follow the class conversations. See “HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Twitter #Hashtags” (Parr, 2009) athttp://mashable.com/2009/05/17/twitter-hashtags/.http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/twitter-hashtags/ 3) Set clear expectations of how you expect your students to use Twitter. My #1 rule is: NOTHING RUDE, CRUDE OR SOCIALLY UNACCEPTABLE. Discuss the number and quality of tweets that you would like to see, as well as some options of rhetorical approaches of their tweets. At first I asked students to tweet quotations, questions, and comments. After we realized that the QQC approach was too formulaic for readable tweets, I encouraged students to offer at least three valuable tweets before each class meeting, one of which must be a response to a statement or a question presented by a classmate. This approach encouraged the sort of positive peer pressure that made students so eager to share in class. See “Fourteen Types of Tweets” (Comm, 2009) for an excellent review of the varieties of tweet categories and functions. 4) Reread the class Twitter stream as part of your final preparations for class. Note areas of student enthusiasm and confusion. Demystify what deserves demystification, but also lead the class in a discussion of what students feel to be the crux of a text. If you can, allude to Twitterers by name to involve them in the conversation and to validate their out-of-class work, (you can do this by tagging them in the conversation, by starting with @theirprofilename 5) Validate and reward substantive and helpful Twitter participation. Suggest ways that students can present the quality and quantity of Twitter participation at the end of the class in the form of a portfolio. Recognize the importance of class participation and preparation by rewarding those who sustain the spirit of enthusiasm and critical inquiry in your class. Make your policies clear beforehand so students know at the beginning how you expect them to invest in your class. 6) Tweet multiple media. My class appreciated my tweeted links to pictures of Jimmy Morales and Sandra Torres during the Guatemalan election, and articles related to poverty in Central America, after we watching Living On One Dollar. Challenge students to direct their peers to relevant images, audio, and video that might help them understand the settings and context of assigned texts. The Web site http://www.tvider.com, for example, makes it easy to share video and other media with Twitter followers http://www.tvider.com If you want your students to engage with their world, have them use a hashtag that others in the world are using. During the presidential election in Guatemala, my students used the hashtag of the candidate’s name that they liked…guess what…so did many Guatemalans, and this connected my students with citizens in Guatemala that were “liking” and “retweeting” my students’ comments. Talk about global engagement!! Adventures In Student Engagement: How to get started with Twitter in the classroom:

2. Students are very guarded with their work, their thoughts, and any products of their learning. Usually, in the general education classroom, the products of learning are what is written on a paper, handed to a teacher, handed back with a grade, and no engagement with the “REAL WORLD” happens. Everything happens in practice only. And yet, upon graduation, students will be expected to participate in online communities for college, and for work on a regular basis. Turn our social Twitter-ers into Twitter Kings and Queens of academic discourse, engaged in their field of choice, chiming in on what is important to their career choice, and putting their thoughts and ideas about important matters out there for everyone to see…who knows…someone might just offer them a scholarship, an internship or a job based on what was seen on their Twitter-feed! Live-tweeting a filmive-tweeting a film In this way I turned movie watching—a lean-back activity—into a lean- forward practice. When students directed their tweets as replies to each other, it was social, much more social than viewing the film in class together. Over a 5-day period I had hundreds of tweets coming in, and I used a tool called Storify to track rhetorical and interpretative moves students made during this assignment. In particular, I categorized the incoming tweets, bringing to the surface some underlying themes in my students’ tweets. And then we began the next class period by examining the tweets and the themes they pointed to.Storify “Twitter essay” This is an idea I borrowed from Jesse Stommel at Georgia Tech. For this activity, students wrote an “essay” of exactly 140 characters defining the word “education.” The 140-character constraint makes this essay into a kind of puzzle, one that requires lean-forward style of engagement. Again I used Storify to capture my students’ essays and cluster them around themes. I was also able to highlight a Twitter debate that broke out among my students about the differences between the public and private schools. This was a productive debate that I’m not sure would have occurred if I hadn’t forced the students into being so precise—because they were on Twitter—about their use of language.Jesse Stommel Lean-Forward With Twitter Simple, low-stakes activities highlighting a blend of technology and a lean-forward social pedagogy asking students to think critically to foster inquiry and discovery