5th Grade- Experiments with Tweeting

My 5th graders are going to learn about social networking, specifically formats like Twitter.  Each student will be tweeting in a more manual form about a variety of topics throughout the school year.  This started with discussions about Vermeer and Vasquez portraiture.  Students learned many of the tricks used to get proportion correct and the placement of facial features just right.  We used mirrors to help students create more accurate portraits of themselves.  The drawings were done in pencil and then lightly colored in with colored pencil.  Next, we glued then onto paper to create a Twitter looking strip and added screen names. I will be laminating them over the next few weeks and then students can respond to my tweets with a dry erase marker.  The tweets can then be posted for everyone to read.  I think there are probably lots of ways to use these in the classroom, but I haven't thought of all the possible applications yet.  I got the idea from a speaker I heard at the MSDC conference last year.  Other ideas like this are available on his web site http://kevinhoneycutt.org/