At 22, I suddenly felt like a grandmother who was totally lost in the current youth's social media.
When I hear the word tweet, I think of a bird. I knew they couldn't be talking about birds.
So, for the sake of myself and other clueless educators, I investigated.
Twitter is a social networking tool for busy people. It allows individuals to update their status in 140 characters or less, and acts as a way to keep family, co-workers, and friends up to date on what a person is up to and currently doing. You can update on the web, or even from your phone.
I've never had a phone with internet, I'm just glad that I finally have a computer with internet, let alone a phone that can allow other people to know what I am doing on a daily basis.
Twitter is a free service, just like Facebook and MySpace. It only takes a few minutes to set up an account, and you can start updating what you are doing by doing a tweet right away.
People are tweeting all over the place on the web, about everything. The topics range from what is going on at a person's favorite football game, to what happened at a party they attended last night.
But as educators, can we use a social media device like twitter in the classroom?
I would say yes.
Teachers can use twitter for class discussion. Students are familiar with it, and like it, so you could use it to have class feedback, and to keep conversations going inside and outside of the classroom. Kind of like a short version of a discussion board.
It also creates a sense of community within the classroom. Some students, who may be too shy to ask questions or speak out in class, can communicate not only with the teacher, but also with the students in class. Students also can get to know each other on a media they feel comfortable with. The way I see it, Twitter looks like a good way for students to develop relationships amongst each other in this technologically advanced world.
Twitter also allows students to have a better sense of the world. Students can look at what other people are tweeting about, and what is going on in the world around them. Some student may even have a Tweetdeck set up on their phone or computer.
Twitter also gives instant feedback. Twitter's always-on feature allows students to talk to each other about topics that are confusing.
Students can also use it to write creatively. It is boring always writing in essayist style for classes. Writing short pieces is creative, and all the fluff is left out because you only have 140 characters of allowable space to get out your latest update.
As an English major myself, I could see myself using twitter to create a story. Have one student write a 140- character- long piece, and have the next student add, the next student add, and continue it on until every student in the class had written something. Then you could put what everyone wrote together and develop and work on as a class, a creative writing piece.
There are many more ways that current teachers are using twitter in the classroom as well.
I thought Twitter was stupid, and had no interest in even knowing what it was.
Now that I know what Twitter is, I see that it has potential to try and connect kids to learning, and to keep them interested in topics that don't always grab their attention at first.
Give Tweets a chance.
Tweet, Tweet, Tweet.
