Surprisingly there are many ways to use twitter as an educator.
Twitter makes staying in touch and sharing announcements easy and fun. These ideas offer a great way to put the website to use.
- Keep students updated: Using hashtags on Twitter, students who were not able to make it to class can follow along and stay on top of the conversation.
- Assignment coordination: Instead of emailing each other or waiting to meet in class, students can collaborate on projects and keep track of changes by using a Twitter hashtag.
- Silencing students that blurts answers out: For students who have trouble with disruptive blurting, allow them to instantly tweet their blurts silently instead of out loud.
- Student engagement in big classes: In large lecture classes where student participation can be intimidating and logistically problematic, Twitter can make it easy for students to engage and discuss during class time.
- Parent communication: Parents can sign up to receive tweets from teachers, learning about activities, tests, projects, and more.
- Instant feedback: Twitter makes it easy to get instant approval and disapproval of discussions, issues, and more right in the classroom.
- Attendance reminders: For students who have trouble making it to class on time, send reminders before school to get them in the door earlier.
Tweet about upcoming due dates or assignments: One of the simplest ways that teachers can use Twitter in the classroom involves setting up a feed dedicated exclusively to due dates, tests or quizzes.
Here's a video about twitter being used in the classroom.
Very engaging video, thanks for sharing! I'm not a big fan of social learning, but Twitter does have its advantages in certain situations. Alas, in Eastern Europe this social networks is not popular at all (maybe for political protests), so for us it will require some attitudinal interventions to start using it on a regular basis, but in general Twitter can help integrate technologies into education. Enjoy your winter break!
ReplyDeleteOne of my colleagues and close friends uses Twitter quite frequently to supplement his class. It's a great way for him to show off his quirky personality with timely jokes about class content and pass along relevant outside sources. It's also a nice way to retweet content from extracurricular activities to help promote them as well.
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