Twitter in the Classroom

A great blog post Potential uses of twitter in teacher education courses discusses an up and coming website that has potential for educational use. It describes Twitter as “a microblogging platform that allows users to publish brief text updates of up to 140 characters onto the web-based twitter network (aka the "twitterverse").” You can enter these mini updates as often as you like and you can receive “feeds” from the people you choose to follow. Others can add you to their feed and receive the updates you publish. It is like a group chat room with more opportunity to choose who you want to hear from or respond to. It has many opportunities for the classroom.

From the blog above the author states “Our class discussions are often (always?) limited by our time together in a common physical space, it could be used to continue the conversation on a more informal, synchronous basis as thoughts occur.” Students could create a specific account for their classroom tweeting and could then follow all the students/teachers in their class. Specific times could be scheduled where class members could go on to seek out information from other students or teachers, to post comments or further class discussion that seem to end to early.

The article 25+ Incredibly Useful Twitter Tools and Firefox Plugins describes another application of twitter TweetDeck which “Aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces. Tweet Deck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets.” This can facilitate the creation of a group of classroom tweeters on the students page so the updates from them are easier to access.