Though it's only 140 characters, for the most part, that's all you need!
For example,
Twitter is a great place to post a running news feed of the class including updates during field trips, articles relevant to the current topic or previous topics discussed in class.
Twitter can also be used to coordinate assignments. Rather than students being bombarded with 20 emails a day from friends, teachers, colleagues, and school faculty members, students can use Twitter to collaborate on projects or quickly let someone know about any changes.
Twitter can also be used to facilitate games. For example, students could "live tweet" as if they were a real person relevant to the current study. Other students can then try to guess who this particular student is portraying via @replies.
Twitter can also be used to connect classrooms. Teachers and students from around the county, state, or even across oceans can collaborate on assignments and keep up to date on current issues.
Twitter can be great to post sample questions from the upcoming test/quiz, or it could even be used as a facilitation device for a "Question of the Day," etc. activity.
Personally, Twitter will be used in my classroom on a "Need to Know" basis. By that, I mean syllabus changes, upcoming due dates, test and quiz dates, important materials needed for class, or even supplemental materials including the weather forecast or just a quote or joke of the day.
In short, though there is a limit to how many characters you can use in a tweet, sometimes less is better. If there is a thought you desperately want to share on Twitter that cannot be shortened to 140 characters or less, one can always @reply to themselves. By doing so, their tweets will show up chronologically with a line connecting the two tweets. This allows for parents, students, or educators, to read it as if it was one long tweet.
Once I have become more familiar with the teaching aspect of my clasroom, and I settle in to the course and my lesson plan, I will explore the option of connecting classrooms whether that be on a school wide scale or a nation/country-wide scale. No matter how Twitter is used, it can be a very functional tool for any classroom with open access to technology.
Hi Jimmy,
ReplyDeleteI've always wanted to see Twitter used in the classroom because it forces the student to be concise and conscientious about what they have to say. I also liked that you gave so many different examples of how it could be used and even a short insight into how you, personally, might use it in your future classroom. As for a couple ideas of improvement, I would add screenshots of the website as well as the tweet making process. I would assume most people understand the functionality of twitter such as hashtags or usernames but it would improve the structure of this post. Speaking of structure, I think that if you labeled off some sections it would make the post more understandable. Overall, the meat of the assignment is there, it just needs a little TLC.