Thursday, June 25, 2009

Twitter in Education

Do you tweet? With the Twitter explosion around the world, more and more educators are wondering what--if any--benefit Twitter can bring to the classroom. Check out this video of Dr. Monica Rankin, a professor of History at UT Dallas, who was looking for a way to involve more students in her large class in classroom discussion.



Click here to read the notes of Dr. Rankin's experiment, and here to read the blog post from Kim Smith, the graduate student who created the video.

We'd love to hear your comments about this emerging and popular technology. Do you use Twitter in the classroom? Tell us more. :)

3 comments:

jamie lewsadder said...

Hi! I started tweeting my homework (9th and 10th grade English). The kids love it and some parents follow me too. One more way to increase communication and now the kids have their agendas in their pockets!

Mackie Jackie said...

I used Twitter in my classroom this past fall. I was working on a political literacy project and we used various forms of social media in our project. The students used Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs to write about political issues that were concerning them. They also used the various social media sites to follow politicians tweets. They then wrote blogs about what they were learning from the tweets. It was interesting to see that they connected more with the politicians who personally tweeted as opposed to the politicians who used paid staff members to tweet for them. They picked up on this by the studying the language of the tweets.

I think it is important to tap into student interests and make them apart of the classroom. Technology is a great way to do this. The more we incorporate things they like into our lessons, the less it will feel like work to the students. It also shows the students that we understand them and want to make them feel apart of the curriculum.

My only suggestion when using social media sites is to set up some guidelines for the students before they start. In particular, you need to decide if you will allow them to blog/tweet/write in abbreviations or if you want it to sound professional. Also, make sure to encourage spell check before they post.

MrMiltonBHS said...

I've used social media (including Twitter) in a variety of ways. This is a write up of using Twitter to with the Industrial Revolution (http://bit.ly/HjGdoZ ). This is an example of using Blogger, Twitter, and the power of my PLN to allow students to bring Enlightenment thinkers to a 21st century world (http://bit.ly/Hlnxlo ).

What else have people done?