Va. Board of Education urges policy on social networks as teaching tools – The Washington Post.

Kimiya Haghighi, 17, had a prose problem. As much as her teachers preached concise writing, her sentences remained long and overwrought — the words poured out, unpunctuated, one after another.

Then Aubrey Ludwig, her 11th-grade English teacher at Langley High School, introduced her class to Twitter, requiring that students tweet their responses to a Hemingway assignment in 140 characters or less. Suddenly, Haghighi’s writing was efficient, declarative, even staccato. “It was a total breakthrough,” she said.

Read on for the rest of the story…. good things do come in techie packages.