Ben is now on twitter.  The exciting thing is that all of his friends are there as well which was a surprise to me because when I first got on twitter students were not.  

The not so exciting thing is that their many of their tweets are nothing more than social jabs, retweets of funny quotes, the occasional inappropriate comment, and texts masquerading as tweets.  

So, this article in Scientific American, Being a Digital Native Isn’t Enough, which was tweeted out by Tom Whitby, was a great reminder of the work we need to do to teach students how to use these tools to learn, share, connect and even, yes, make friends.  

Here’s the quote that stuck out for me:

Since children these days are classified as being native to all things digital, one would think they should be able to master the operation of anything with an “on” button. This mistakenly groups all technology, including video games and online search engines, in the same category. Just because a child jumps at the opportunity to program a TV to record his or her favorite shows does not mean that he or she will approach a classroom learning tool with the same zeal.

The take home for me:  If we want Twitter to be a classroom learning tool, we need to be teaching how to use it as a learning tool.