Party in my office!

I'm having a little party in my office today while eating my favorite school lunch (chicken nuggets and fake mashed potatoes!).

Okay, back to the party...

Today is World Read Aloud Day and it also happens to be Wednesday, the day all of the students and teachers in our school read silently for enjoyment for 20 minutes. Earlier this week, I invited teachers to take a few minutes today to celebrate World Read Aloud Day. Let me repeat-INVITED, not required, not demanded, not requested. 

Here's what happened:

• a choir teacher had his students each read aloud one line from their own books
• a science teacher asked students to read one paragraph from their own books
• a health/P.E. teacher read a picture book aloud to her class
• a guidance counselor viewed a video of someone reading Oh, the Places You'll Go!
• striving junior high readers Skyped with elementary students down the block and read Shel Silverstein poems to them (one young man even got a surprise Skype visit from his little sister!)

I work with awesome people. 

Tweeta-be: Wannabe Twitter User

TWEETA-BE: I looked it up and it's not on Urban Dictionary... yet. However, I did learn a new word that is also fitting for this discussion: twitterate-someone literate in Twitter. For example, "Until a brief email exchange this morning with my hipster colleague, Jack, I was struggling to become twitterate."

I originally joined Twitter strictly for professional growth. Unfortunately, since I am not twitterate, it has not done much for me in the way of professional development. Believe it or not, a pivotal moment happened last night during an episode of The Bachelor (#guiltypleasures).

My colleague, Jack, tweeted about me-Is @jesscrooker screaming at her television right now?! And it became clear, that Jack was to be my Tweacher.

So for any of you who are striving to become twitterate, I'm posting Jack's email tutorial. And for those of you studying literacy, consider the nuances of learning to become twitterate and then think about the unique features of your content area texts which need to be explicitly taught.

Totally different from Facebook. The hashtag (#) is a way of trending your thoughts. For instance, if you were tweeting about the Superbowl this year, everyone was using a hashtag like #superbowl2012. If you were to click on that hashtag, you can see everyone else who used that same hashtag on Twitter, or in other words, everyone else who was talking about the Superbowl. Sometimes you want to do hashtags just to be funny like #killmenow or something like that. The key to hashtags is there are no spaces in between words.

The @ symbol is just used for referencing other people.

Sometimes tweets have RT in front of them. That lets others know you are re-tweeting someone else’s tweet. Standard protocol says you need to say who said the original tweet after you put in RT, though. So, if you re-tweeted something I said, it would look like this: “RT @jacknilles I need chocolate cake #midnightcravings” or something like that.

You may even want to comment back to that person while letting your own followers see what you’re talking about. In which case, you put your reply before the RT. It might look like this: “Me too! RT @jacknilles I need chocolate cake #midnightcravings”

Crazy, eh?!