Ask the readers: Teaching with Twitter
July 31, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
I think Twitter is a hoot. It’s a good way to keep track of what other educators are up to. Also, I love a witty one-liner, and 140 characters is the perfect format for that. There are plenty of reasons teachers should use Twitter.
What I want to know is whether Twitter is useful enough to teach with it? Do any of you use Twitter in your lesson plans? Any Twitter-based assignments? Again, I think Twitter is highly useful and fun for teachers, but “fun new app” isn’t always synonymous with “great teaching tool” (see Wordle). If you use Twitter in your teaching, please share your ideas in the comments. Oh, and follow us on Twitter.
Related stuff:
Professional development is just a “tweet” away
Follow LEARN NC/Instructify on Twitter
I’ve used twitter in my AP Biology class to help students summarize a chapter section in their text. It works well because my students find the textbook really hard to read and struggle with identifying the most important key points in a section. So I assign them to read a section and summarize it in 140 characters. They really struggle with this assignment at first, but they start to get the hang of it after awhile. It helps them get the big picture. Because I assign each student a different section, at the end all of the students have a great summary of the entire chapter.
Thanks for weighing in, Stacy. That makes a lot of sense. Summarizing one’s thoughts in a concise manner is a valuable skill. 140 characters is pretty darn concise.
I help run the writing program for a community college in Virginia. As part of a learning community this coming semester, we’re going to have groups of students Tweet and follow one another. The LC is focused on students learning to make difficult life choices and succeed in college, and we’re looking at this assignment as a way of students getting immediate feedback from one another on problems/solutions they encounter in their first semester of college. We’re already seeing an 8% increase in retention and persistance, but we’re hoping this addition will bump this number up into the double digits. As the LC and their group will both act as safty nets and “sponsers” for students, but the Tweeter group will be semi-real time.
I’ve read two interesting ideas for classroom use recently.
The first one is that the chatter can tend to bleed outside of the classroom. This phenomena can happen in a couple different ways, too. Students may tweet and reply to others well after the class has ended. If you hashtag some keywords in your discussion, you might pull some responses from Twitterers who aren’t even in your class (for better or worse).
The other suggestion is you can encourage your students to follow celebrities. No, not pop culture celebs! Instead, encourage students to follow small-time celebs who are politicians, subject matter experts, lead thinkers, and so on. These people don’t tweet about when they eat breakfast. They give actual value to the subjects your students are studying.
[...] 1) From Instructify: Teaching with Twitter [...]
