My Love-Hate Relationship with Twitter + Reading Like an Historian Thoughts

So...each Monday a group of Social Studies teachers get on to Twitter and discuss a topic for about an hour or so.  I found out about this at a recent Utah Council of Social Studies teachers conference and I finally got up the courage a little while ago to start my own Twitter account.  Feel free to follow @KimberlyNHawks :)  However, they had taken a break for the Christmas holidays and this was the first time that I felt like I could know what I was doing enough to get involved this time and not make a mess. Problem is I didn't realize that it started at 7 ET time not my MT! Hence the hate relationship with Twitter...I lose track with ALL of the posts.  I get why people have it on their phones, because that could be the only way to possibly keep up.  Though I would not want it constantly bugging me with new alerts.

My love relationship with Twitter is how much I have learned from everyone on Twitter!  Since I missed the chat, I got on and look at a couple of the posts that went through.  If you want to go see it is always #sschat and the moderator tonight was @SHEG_Stanford.  They did a great job talking about teaching ideas with primary sources and helping the students read as historians.  I want to do a quick run down of what I learned and my own ideas since I didn't know the time difference.

Impressions

• Students need to be writing about what they are reading--and it doesn't have to be an essay because we all know that we are SO busy to grade.  There was a def theme of even writing a paragraph is great because you can focus on different things at different times.
• I retweeted the best idea I saw: : frequent quick writes on 3x5 cards. Thesis para on front, 6 bulleted pieces of evidence on back I can see my students actually maybe willing to do this.

My Quick Ideas

• Along the same lines as the 3x5 cards, since I have the benefit of a small class but you could do this in groups too--come up with what the main purpose/thesis of the source was and then have the students chalk write the supports/evidence of that thesis
• I love the site: http://web.wm.edu/hsi/?svr=www because they are set up for the kids to be detectives.  I did The Case of Sam Smiley to introduce the ideas of being detectives.  The kids really got off on the CSI idea of it.  

P.S. Tomorrow there is a #Wrldchat at 8 pm est...so I will be getting on promptly at 6 pm....if I remember :P