Twitter in the Classroom

On the website Educational Technology and Mobile Learning I found a great list of educational uses for Twitter. The list was broken up into five categories: Communication, Organization, Resources, Writing Skills, and Twitter Exercises. The more common educational uses for Twitter were listed such as sending out mass announcements, providing feedback and communicating with parents. There were also many ideas that had not occurred to me. For example, under communication there was a suggestion to use Twitter as ambient office hours so that teachers can be more accessible to students. Under organization a suggestion I thought could be really useful to me in the future was using Twitter to recap the day's lesson. A recommendation under resources was to follow Twitter news streams in the target language. For writing skills an idea I liked was assigning a daily or weekly word game on Twitter. Then under Twitter exercises I thought another good idea was to give bonus points for students who use Twitter to participate in discussions that they might feel uncomfortable to join in class.

A second article I read addressed how to establish a Twitter routine in the classroom. The author was writing specifically about grades K-8 who cannot establish their own Twitter accounts but I think the information can be adapted to other age groups. The visual roadmap graphic was really informative. It starts out by pointing out why teachers should Tweet with their class for example to communicate, to practice writing skills and to develop a sense of digital citizenship. The roadmap then moves on to how to familiarize students with the Twitter scene, what it means to be a follower, how to follow someone, and how to evaluate the feeds of others. Finally the visual shows how using Twitter can encourage students to use both lower and higher order thinking skills. I found this graphic very helpful in visualizing the process of introducing and utilizing Twitter in the classroom.

Twitterchatting

I followed the #eltchat on Twitter on Wednesday morning. The majority of teachers who attended the chat were from England but there were also teachers who were living and teaching abroad in places like Saudi Arabia. I thought that having teachers with varied backgrounds helped to stimulate the conversation and produced diverse observations and suggestions. The topic of the chat was the importance of the starting and ending of a lesson. What I liked about the chat was that it was informal, that anyone was welcome and could post a comment or idea. Also, I found that several participants had some interesting ideas of how to organize the beginning and ending of class. There were also some links and references given to reading material and resources on the topic. I found the tone of the chat to be very positive, welcoming and open to ideas. There was a lot of positive feedback and encouragement between participants.

I will say though that the format of a Twitterchat is somewhat confusing and hard to keep up with. There were multiple conversations going on at once so it could be somewhat hard to follow one train of thought. Also not everyone followed the specific questions that were posted by the moderator and a few participants would go off subject and make jokes. Due to the rapid nature of the chat sometimes the new question that was posted was not seen and people kept posting about the last question or they did not like/understand a question and ignored it. Ultimately though a Twitterchat is an informal venue so that is what is nice about it, participants can comment on what they want and say what they want without too much censorship. I liked the experience and can see that it could be useful for professional development and for networking. There were many useful ideas expressed in a short period of time and I felt that there were things that I could try to implement in class.