Signs of Spring 2012It’s time for another Twitter project to get your class organised to look about and observe the signs of Spring in their environment. We started off these projects last year with a Signs of Spring and Signs of Autumn Twitter project. It was felt that we did the Signs of Spring project a little too early last year in early February, so we decided to do it about a month later this year in the hope that pupils might be able to see more definitive signs of Spring around them.

The idea is simple. Just Tweet with your pupils any time during the week of March 4th – 8th about any signs of Spring that you see in your classroom, school area or locality. Even better, Tweet a photo of the sign of Spring that you and your pupils noticed. To keep all of the Tweets together use the following Twitter hashtag: #antearrach Possible things you could Tweet about might be:

  • Spring flowers blossoming
  • Baby lambs in a field
  • Animals and their Young
  • Birds building nests
  • Pupils’ Spring art work

There are lots of classes on Twitter now and some may have recently joined so this might be the perfect opportunity for you to Tweet with your class. Let other schools/classes that you are in contact with through Twitter know about the project and invite them to join in. If you are in contact with a school abroad, get them to join in too to give the project an international dimension. To make the project collaborative, don’t forget to reply to/comment on the Tweet of another school. So let’s build up a picture through Twitter of what the Signs of Spring in Ireland 2013 are during the week. You may wish to use a Twitter Client like Tweetdeck (which I use in class) or Twitterfall which will allow you to set up a specific column to view all of the #antearrach Tweets as they come in during the week.

Things to Bear in Mind

  • Don’t forget the Project hashtag (#antearrach) in every Tweet so that they may be collated at the end of the project.
  • If your Twitter account is private, you will have to unblock it for the week so that your Tweets can be collated into the Project transcript. You can make it private again after the week is over.
  • Bear in mind pupil safety on the internet – don’t Tweet photos of individual pupils, only groups of pupils and don’t identify the pupils in the photos.

Project Conditions

A condition of joining in the project is that you agree to have your Tweets collated into a project transcript to be available as a download to all teachers through Seomra Ranga. Also, if you Tweet a photograph, you agree to it being included in a photo album on Seomra Ranga’s Flickr Page which will keep a record of the Signs of Spring 2013. If you are comfortable with those simple conditions, then let the Tweets flow from March 4th – 8th. Again, don’t forget to include #antearrach in every Tweet so that it can be collated into the transcript.