There is a defence of her on the Guardian website now. xjk

In regards twittering from class: imagine your best friend was a journalist and you were to tell them a story about a classroom incident that was then published the next day. No corroboration, no right of reply, no balanced perspective.

I always advise my students when writing a reflection on their teaching practice to ensure anonymity, but also to focus any criticism towards themselves: thing that they have learned and things they could do better. I’m not interested in the narrative of the events that took place in the class: pupil x told me to, “go take flying leap!”. I looked him in the eye and asked him to, “pick a window your leaving!”

I believe blogs and twitters are good ideas, but need to be used with care. They require ethical consideration and need rules defined or at least stated explicitly for professional such as teachers.

And this Daily Mail style journalism is pretty low really.

The whole thing does bring up a lot of points for discussion about our online personas – something I will dwell on for another blog post.

Nothing to see here – move along please!

Sadly it seems that a new tactic for journalists is to cherry pick twitter messages and base stories around them (they’ve done the same for chaps like Jonathon Ross etc)

We need teachers to use Twitter and any other popular tools because soon they will be enabling independent learning using any tool that is relevant – and Twitter certainly is. Look at all the professional groups who use it to network.

Best wishes,
David
http://www.sums.co.uk