Social Media in the Classroom: Using Twitter in the Classroom

The use of social media is becoming greater in the classrooms and one of the tools that teacher are starting to use is Twitter.  Twitter can be used in the classroom in many different ways.  One way that it can be used is to communicate with the class.  Twitter is composed of short descriptions and tagged using a hashtag.  As a teacher you can give the students an assignment to do on Twitter and by giving them the hashtag they need to use allows the teacher to go online and search for that hashtag and they can look at what the students wrote.  Along with this the teacher is able to do a quick assessment of the students to see if they are fully understanding and doing the assignment correctly.

My favorite thing about Twitter is that it makes students use higher order of thinking skills in order to use Twitter and to get their point across.  Twitter messages are limited to 150 characters which makes the students really think about what they are going to write and answer in their work so that the people reading it will fully understand what they are trying to say.  For example, if you had a student read a certain book and they had 150 characters to give everyone the main idea or point of a book it would make them truly have to sit down and think of the write things to say in order for everyone to get the point.  This takes true higher order of thinking for students.

Another way teachers have used Twitter in the classroom is to have students act as if they are a character in a book and all of their Tweets are about their character helping other students to be able to fully understand what the character is doing and experiencing.  Twitter is a great tool for the classroom and there are so many ways that teachers can incorporate it into their classrooms.  I encourage you to try it today!

References:

Inman Middle Media Technology. Why Use Twitter in the Classroom.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOlS69JUoE4.

Sewickley Academy. 9 Ways to Use Social Media in the Classroom. http://blog.sewickley.org/9-ways-to-use-social-media-in-your-classroom