Twitter Summary

For as long as students have been reading text books, teachers have been trying to find ways to help students understand what the main ideas of reading passages are. Science text books have traditionally been seen as intimidating to students. Text books have evolved, and important vocabulary is often highlighted and in some places the main idea of a paragraph is boldfaced. Despite these advances in text books, students still struggle when tasked with identifying the main ideas.

The Twitter Summary is a useful tool for students to practice identifying and expressing the main idea of a section of text. When using Twitter, each “Tweet” may only be 140 characters in length. This forces the students to focus and streamline what they think the main idea is. It also helps them to practice paraphrasing what other people have written. When the students have narrowed their main ideas down to 140 characters or less, the teacher then “Tweets” them out to the world.

An extension of the Twitter Summary is to have the students illustrate their “Tweets”. Students create displays of their written summary that includes drawings or other art that is related to the content in the Tweet.

I have found the Twitter Summary to be a fun, engaging and unique activity that helps students to interact with a text instead of simply looking at the letters and words. As a cooperative learning strategy it also gives the students practice improving social skills by working with and learning from their peers.