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In my own classes I've been deliberately vague about what students should tweet about. I didn’t want overly prescriptive guidelines to constrain what might be possible. Instead, I wanted our integration of Twitter to evolve organically. Given this open-ended invitation, I’ve found students tend to use Twitter for class in three ways: to post news and share resources relevant to the class; to ask questions and respond with clarifications about the readings; and to write sarcastic, irreverent comments about the readings or my teaching. The first two behaviors add to the community spirit of the class and help to sustain student interest across the days and weeks of the semester. The third behavior, when I first noticed it, was an utterly unexpected finding. (And as I've argued elsewhere, it was a good, powerful surprise that legitimated my use of Twitter in and outside of the classroom. I saw students take an oppositional stance in their writing—a welcome reprieve from the majority of student writing, which avoids taking any stance at all.)

I strongly recommend creating a permanent Twitter archive. A free service such as TwapperKeeper will track a specified hashtag, collecting the tweets 24/7, and you simply return to TwapperKeeper any time to download the archive. It's so easy to use that I've begun creating TwapperKeeper archives for any hashtag there's even the slightest chance I'll be interested in revisiting later. Another useful archiving tool is called, appropriately enough, The Archivist.

If you want to learn something from Finland, it’s the implementation of ideas. It’s looking at education as nation-building. We have very carefully kept the business of education in the hands of educators. It’s practically impossible to become a superintendent without also being a former teacher. … If you have people [in leadership positions] with no background in teaching, they’ll never have the type of communication they need.

Finns don’t believe you can reliably measure the essence of learning. You know, one big difference in thinking about education and the whole discourse is that in the U.S. it’s based on a belief in competition. In my country, we are in education because we believe in cooperation and sharing. Cooperation is a core starting point for growth.

The social-networking giant has opened its first-ever office in Asia—in the country where being all up in one another's business is practically a birthright.

Shashi Tharoor, the country's junior minister for foreign affairs, has become a major national celebrity thanks to his tweets, the candor of some of which has got him into trouble with the fustier, unwired elements of the cabinet to which he belongs. Tharoor has nearly 700,000 followers, putting him in the top 10 of the world's tweeting politicians. (He is almost certainly the only one who writes every tweet himself.)

The invisible nature of great teaching becomes apparent when we try and make some kind of judgement on what we see in the classroom

I think the problem actually goes much deeper than teachers demonstrating teaching for lesson observations and learning walks. I worry that it has permeated the culture and led to teachers focusing on the demonstration of learning too. A culture of doing.

fetishisation of visible signs of teaching and learning that infects our professional culture. The activity becomes the thing. When a teacher cries out “but you did this!” in the face of blank stares a few weeks later, we are seeing this problem played out. “Did” and “learnt” are two very different beasts