Twitter for Teaching

An interesting read, Amanda Wynter’s article Bringing Twitter to the Classroom shows a high school English teacher experimenting with integrating Twitter into his classroom. He does ultimately seem to have success, and students appear to have been more engaged and interested in participating in discussion when given the opportunity to do so online.

There are quite a few interesting observations about having students use Twitter throughout the article. In particular, I liked the part about how students could “utilize their experiences in English class and include their class hashtags as they responded to tweets from One Direction and Tim Tebow.” This allows the teacher to measure students' comprehension and application of concepts introduced in class. The opportunity to directly connect students back to class during their leisure time is certainly attractive, but could also be difficult in terms of winning over reluctant parents who may be particularly protective of students’ online activity. I also liked the idea of this teacher sharing students’ tweets to his network of education-oriented followers to favorite and reply to students’ ideas. Not only would it be a great opportunity to practice for a language class, but students can also experience their ideas being thought worth reading by other people out in the real world.

Searching for more ideas about how to make use of Twitter as a teacher, I came across 60 Inspiring Examples of Twitter in the Classroom by Global Digital Citizen Foundation. It’s a pretty straightforward list of (you guessed it) 60 links to examples of ways to implement Twitter into a class. They’re split into sections like Communication, Organization, Resources, Writing Skills, and Twitter Exercises. Many seem obvious, but there are a few that stuck out as clever.

I like the ideas of having students follow public figures or news agencies for easily digestible news summaries, network with native speakers who share interests, and build a foreign language content stream. I also liked the idea of teachers connecting their classes to exchange foreign language practice. Twitter is a great way for the language learner to practice because each post is limited to 140 characters, so students never have to struggle with staring at a big page of foreign language. They can feel good about understanding and being understood more easily in such concise messages. Using any of these activities over Twitter seems like it would be a smart way to get students to practice outside the classroom.

In addition to the social networking benefits teachers enjoy when growing a professional network, there are also many possibilities for language learners to improve by making direct use of a global communication tool like Twitter.

#LangChat - Twitter as a Professional Development Resource

Logging into Twitter can be overwhelming sometimes. There’s a lot going on and any given tweet could be pushed out of view before we get the chance to give it a look. For those of use who check our Twitter feeds every once in a while, it can seem like too much of a mess to bother keeping up with. Scheduled at specific times and organized by hashtags, Twitter chats turn the microblogging platform into a more straightforward chat session about a given topic. Yesterday, I spent about an hour checking out a Twitter chat about language education, #LangChat.

LangChat has multiple sessions scheduled throughout the week, which makes a lot of sense given the global nature of the topic (world language education) and platform. I joined the session that starts at 10AM EST Saturday morning. The chat is operated in a Q&A format with moderators proposing questions and participants posting answers, sparking some discussion as replies. At the end of the chat, participants are asked to share what they took away from the session.



I think this platform and discussion format works really well. Dropping in on a weekly chat like this is a great way to find and share ideas and resources. It’s also a great way to find professionals active in your field to expand your network. The questions posted by moderators help jumpstart discussion on relevant topics, and suggestions from participants are also accepted throughout the week. What I like most about doing this via Twitter, as opposed to a discussion forum or similar, is the real-time access to other users. Shooting someone a reply to ask for clarification or to elaborate on a point made is very straightforward, and the responses are more or less immediate. Of course, this also means we have to schedule a specific time to be available to join the session in the first place. Overall, this felt like a great way to utilize the immediacy and quick-moving nature of Twitter in a way that benefitted me more than just occasionally checking a disorganized feed of everyone I’m following.