Flat Stanley Tweets Round The World

Last Wednesday I was asked to head over to one of my favorite schools, Lara Lake primary school to do a presentation for the grade 3-4 students looking at new and emerging ways to communicate. The students had previously done quite a bit of work on looking at the history and science of communication and were all primed ready to step into the world of blogging, Skype, iPhones and Twitter. In the hour session we wrote a quick post on their new unit blog, participated in a Skype session with the wonderful students at Berwick Lodge PS under the tutelage of Lois Smethurst, checked out a few apps, (anyone know the best way to display apps on a data projector?), and sent and checked on the twitter progress of our own version of Flat Stanley, #llpsatn.

For those unfamiliar with the tale, Flat Stanley is the story of a boy, Stanley, who gets flattened in an encounter with a bulletin board that falls off the wall one night. As a result he is flattened so much that he can now fit into an envelope via which he is posted off around the world. Many teachers have taken the story as a stimulus for sending their own version of Stanley, (in the case of LLPS, a felt doll), off by surface mail to a friend elsewhere in the world who then takes a pic with the doll before forwarding the doll onwards and the pic back to the originating class.

I had decided to update this activity and instead of mail use twitter. As a result, at the start of the day, we sent a picture of Flat Stanley out on the internet with Twitter. During the day Twitter Stan didn’t go very far but overnight he started to travel around the world a bit more. You can find out more about Twitter Stan at the LLPS Middle Unit Blog. If you are on Twitter you might like to host Twitter Stan by tweeting the following tweet;

How far can #llpsatn http://tweetphoto.com/14649924 go? Can U help? Pls RT + change 2 UR location Lara Lake, Victoria, Australia

All you need to do is change the location in the message and forward it on. The students at LLPS will love you for it if you do.

Oh and the more astute will notice that the hashtag is slightly astray and not the expected #llpstan, that’s because I was too vain to put my glasses on when composing the tweet.