Teaching Through the Twitterverse: Using Twitter to Teach Critical Reading in the First Year Writing Classroom Handout

This talk was presented as part of Breakout Session 5 | Panel 1: "Digital Literacy." This is the handout from the talk.The fifth FW Hallmark within the UH system is “to help students read texts and make use of a variety of sources in expressing their own ideas, perspectives, and/or opinions in writing.” I have designed an in-class analysis activity that works to address this Hallmark in terms of guiding students to read short texts more critically and in-depth. It also works to provide students with experience analyzing a type of text that many of them view on a daily basis but may not necessarily critically interrogate or perhaps think of as source material for their own writing: Twitter posts. In my teaching demo, I will demonstrate that posts and information found in the Twittersphere can serve as powerful source material for practicing close reading, critical analysis, and logical argument – all key elements of the fifth FY Hallmark