Group items tagged

I love incorporating Twitter into my professional development for teachers. To do this I share the Twitter tag with participants and ask them to Tweet before, during or after our time together depending on the task at hand. I provide the tag for Tweeting to give my students a place and way to share their thoughts and ideas. This serves as a great way I have specific times I check out the Tweets (i.e. work time) and when I bring participants back together we build on those Tweets.

weet to capture reflections during field trips. If you're in a school where cells are banned, you may be able to have students bring them on field trips. If that is not allowed, the chaperon's devices can be used. Rather than have students walk around taking notes. Have them Tweet their reflections. You can set up a tag for your tweets if the place you are visiting doesn't already have one. Give parents the feed and they'll instantly know what their child did at school today and can have robust conversations about it. When students are back at home and/or school a review of the tweets could lead to powerful conversation or could serve as a launch for further study i.e. pick the most interesting tweet or set of tweets and create something to share with others about the topic you are tweeting about. This could be a podcast, video, blog post, etc. These digital creations can all be posted in one place as a reflection collection and even shared on the website of the school and place visited.

In your opinion, what is the most effective way to teach compassion? Or is it even teachable? I would agree the first step is to expose people to the truth which they otherwise would not know. However, is it enough? How do we get people to go beyond sentiments? And when they do act, how can they realize that they should not only help victims, but also look into the cause of that injustice, and try to eliminate that cause? What should be the core elements of a humane education? What can end the sufferings and atrocities of this world? Coming from a nation that was troubled by civil wars and foreign invasions for thousands of years, these are the questions I constantly ask myself. I would appreciate it if you could shed light on them with your insight.

I also think that the best way to build compassion is to get students to encounter suffering directly in ways that make it real. That means getting students out of the classroom to prisons or poor neighborhoods, or at least into encounters with real people who put a human face on various problems. This is one reason why I’m a huge fan of getting students to travel abroad