Twitter.....Before: Nay. Soon to be "Yay"?

Twitter. If you've lived in North America for any length of time, you know what it is. I have to say this, though: I avoided it like the plague when I lived abroad. And I had a lot of reasons which worked juuuuuust fine for me.

The foremost was that I personally believe that longer and more detailed pieces of writing are much more worth my time. I already have a low attention span and I thought that Twitter would reduce that even further. Beyond that, there's a reason that I don't have a smart phone: I'd be that obnoxious guy who would check his phone every second of every day, communicating with people far away but not with the people in close physical proximity. I was living in Korea, where elementary school children had more space aged technology hanging around their little necks than I had in my desktop comp at home. I felt that I had to work hard to not let tech take over my life.

But, really, it came down to this: it wasn't relevant to my students. Most of my students didn't even know what Facebook was much less how to use Twitter effectively. I spent my days trying to get them to put the verb in the beginning part of the sentence rather than at the end, so integrating social networking technology into the classroom was farrrrrrrr from my thoughts. It's not to say that Koreans in general and my students specifically were not technologically savvy. No, no, no, not that. They're some of the biggest online gamers on the planet (multiple TV channels devoted to professional online gaming) and if you look at your cell phone, I bet there is a good chance that it was developed there.

So....where is this attitude going to take me now that I'm a teacher candidate here in Canada? Probably not very far. Most people I know now have smart phones and there seem to be boundless possibilities when it comes to integrating technology (yes, even Twitter) into the classroom. Unfortunately, I am a bit out of touch when it comes to integrating software and online services into my teaching.  Only time and later blog posts will flesh this out but I'm interested and intrigued:  How did you come by Twitter? And further, how have you integrated Twitter either into your own learning or into your teaching? Or have you tried it and decided it wasn't worth it? I'm interested in both sides of the story and I hope that people can point me to some interesting resources.....and ones that are over 140 characters!!