Microblogging

As a teacher, one of my goals is to effectively communicate with families and colleagues. Currently, I send home a bi-weekly newsletter that is loaded with information about things like: what we are learning in our classroom, ways to support students at home, news and notes, etc. While I think this is fairly effective, for a couple of reasons, I would like to, at the very least, supplement the newsletter with timely, ongoing, more frequent classroom updates. I think that Twitter may be just the tool to help me do so. I joined Twitter today and my intention is to invite my students' families to follow me. My goal is that families will be able to check my Tweets daily to stay informed about what is going on in our classroom.
Initially, my impression of Twitter is that it is not quite as user-friendly as Facebook, which I am used to using on a regular basis. I feel like it is more difficult to find people to follow and/or invite others to follow me. If you have any ideas or suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them!
If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, my username is ayensan.

Voice Threads - A Valuable Tool

I had the opportunity to learn about creating and using a Voice Thread today and I am very excited about it! I think that Voice Thread can be a very valuable tool in the classroom. Just this morning at our staff meeting, we were talking about using photographs and visuals to help students develop critical thinking skills by identifying what they see, think, and wonder when observing a piece of art. In my own classroom, I would love to be able to use Voice Thread to provide opportunities for students to see each other's work and share about what they see, think, and wonder. I think Voice Thread would be a useful tool to help students stretch themselves as writers, based on feedback from peers.

While I plan to do a Voice Thread focused on student work in the future, here's a Voice Thread I created today that is family focused. http://voicethread.com/share/981710/