You can only imagine the excitement when we received a tweeted reply...

In my class, I’ve introduced my students to the whole world via Twitter. We started by sending out random tweets about what topic we were exploring that day. One eerily calm day in January, 2011, we tracked a snow storm that was heading our way and found ourselves and our tweets mentioned the next morning on CBC Newsworld , as they followed our snow storm tracking tweets. We like to think we put Iona on the map.

This year, as last, we tweeted out thoughts with students and teacher across the globe as part of the Global Read Aloud Project. We also had fun on February 29^th tweeting with twins as part of our “Math Word Problem of the Day” to figure out their ages because they were born in a leap year. However, the most rewarding experience thus far, is our tweeting as we explored the Holocaust.

Each year, to explore the Holocaust I choose a book to read aloud to the class. We read it. We discuss it. We share some tears.  We beg for another chapter. This year our book was ‘Hana’s Suitcase’ by Karen Levine. As we started the book, we sent out a simple tweet: “We are about to start our read aloud of the book ‘Hana’s Suitcase’ #HanasSuitcase” From there, the excitement built. Page after much anticipated page we learned of Hana and George Brady, two young siblings during the time of the Holocaust. We also learned about a young lady from Japan, Fumiko, who started a Holocaust museum to teach the children of Japan about the Holocaust and about a little girl’s suitcase – Hana’s Suitcase. The story was so interesting.

You can only imagine the excitement when we received a tweeted reply:

: @inmyclassroom  Great! Would love to hear their thoughts! Fumiko

The squeals and questions of disbelief rang through the classroom – Fumiko, whom we were reading about in the book was tweeting with us! All the way from Japan, Fumiko was chatting / tweeting with us! The conversation continued as we leafed through the pages. We asked Fumiko questions; we shared our thoughts. In one tweet we shared journal entries that we featured on the class blog. Then, an hour later, we received a tweet from @LaraHanaBrady. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Who was this tweeter, this online entity with the same name as the little girl in our book? Her niece. George Brady’s daughter.

All of a sudden, learning about such a difficult time in history, something so distant, became real. My little class in Iona had a personal connection to the story we were reading. Suddenly they weren’t just words on a page or a story read by the teacher – they were the real words, thoughts and emotions felt by George, Lara, Fumiko and Hana. As we finish our follow up activities with this book, we are sharing them with Lara, George, Fumiko  and the world. It’s now become a story of the past and the present. A story of here and there. And in many ways, not a story of “them”, but a story of us.

@ruralteacher  @inmyclassroom  What does that mean?  

It means that I’m a teacher in a rural area. To some that means too long of a commute, too few opportunities, but to me it’s in many ways a blessing.

In today’s world, there does not need to be a geographical divide; it’s a world of fast tracking, fast moving, instantaneous technology. I have chosen to embrace the opportunities that technology can provide students, and perhaps the most instantaneous, the most rewarding thus far has been through Twitter.