I have been experimenting with twitter in the MFL classroom and having 12 pupils out of my year 10 class for a science exam was the perfect opportunity to test the system without overloading it.

Year 10 have been working on the topic of las relaciones personales or personal relationships. On Friday 20^th Jan I took the remaining students up to room 565 to debate their opinions in real time, as opposed to as and when they logged in to twitter from home. It was important that it was a small group – as Twitter has been known to crash if lots of people all try logging on at the same time.

The initial problem I posed was a statement in Spanish saying that I thought marriage was a waste of time and money. Using the hashtag #10csp1 (the name of our class) so that I could see what they wrote without me having to follow them, pupils were invited to reply and give their opinions. My intention was that pupils would also interact with one another and the opinions they gave, almost like a group talk lesson but in the written word. I found, however, that they were reliant on interacting with me. This wasn’t a problem, as I was able to ‘mention’ their username so that they would see my reply and as I was limited to 140 characters it was quite simple for me to quickly respond to them.

The good thing about using twitter in this way was the speed. Although at times it took a moment or two for me to see their responses on my computer, the pupils could vey quickly voice their opinion and be heard, as opposed to a speaking activity where they might be talked over by a dominant character. I also found pupils took a long time preparing their tweets and it was maybe 10 minutes or so before the first responses came in. Pupils were spending time preparing their answers which I took to mean they were thinking about the quality.

The problem came with using the ICT suite. It was easy for pupils to get distracted and end up on games whilst waiting for a reply from me, rather than replying to one another. I also found some of the girls tweeting one another via their twitter accounts – this was hard to monitor as because I don’t follow them (I don’t want to see every post they make!) and obviously they were crafty and didn’t use the year 10 hashtag when not tweeting about the topic, it was only if I spotted them that I could stop them doing this.

I will definitely try this again in the future with this class though. It would be nice if from my experiences now I can tell them how to most make the most of the project, by using their group talk phrases to interact with one another and respond to each other. Then I can have more of a facilitator role and perhaps coach them on the quality and accuracy of their written replies.

I teach a high ability year 11 triple Science class, that I find really challenging to motivate. They are unwilling to be creative and think for themselves. I would like to inspire them to both be creative and to see the bigger picture in terms of Science and Engineering and it’s place in society. This project started off as a Formula One project, with the intention of getting an outside speaker to introduce a project to the class. However, having looked at the Specification for the classes’ next topic, it doesn’t fit in very well. Having spoken to an Engineer at Williams F1, they told me about a Worldwide project called The Bloodhound Project which is about inspiring the next generation and getting young people involved in the project to break the Land Speed record. I am currently in discussions with an education director at The Bloodhound Project, to see where we can go with this project, bearing in mind that Year 11 have a limited time until they leave. We want to inspire them before they go!