Educational Uses of Twitter
A friend of mine on a closed social network for WV teachers asked me a couple of weeks ago what educational uses I thought Twitter had. I thought I’d recycle my answer to her. Here it is…
I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago on an instructor at a community college in Texas who’s used Twitter to facilitate discussions in his history class. I’m guessing that similar applications would work in high school classrooms. Of course, Twitter in the classroom provides some liabilities regarding privacy and publishing student work. Maybe a parent’s signature on an acceptable use policy gets around that; I’m not sure…Angie Dowling (teaches in Morganton, I think), pointed me to a microblogging platform with greater security, designed for educators: Edmodo (article at TechCrunch). I don’t know it the law is keeping up with technology, or whether having a closed (passworded) platform gets past the liabilities involved or not. Having a closed system with limited participants certainly serves to manage traffic. But there are other ways to do that – Twitter groups or communities.
I use Twitter as part of a personal learning network. I follow
130160 people on Twitter at the moment. It’s one way I know, for example, that Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) is having a summer book study and that Wesley Fryer (Moving at the Speed of Creativity) had a new post yesterday on copyright and the idea of creating a culture of information sharing (“sharing by default”). Of course, Twitter overlaps with my RSS reader for this. But I have a few dozen people in Twitter who
- don’t write a blog
- work as educators, often with some job focus on technology and
- will often answer questions I ask on Twitter, especially if I direct the question specifically at them.
Twitter is a marvelous professional development tool, IMHO.
Instructional use? If you can do it with chat, you can probably do it with Twitter. Slightly different limitations. You have to be a little more succinct. But you can create clickable links. And there’s a more-or-less permanent record automatically created. AcademHack has some interesting ideas for Twitter assignments. An example of middle school use is at Digital Directions (Education Week).
Backing away to a slightly broader perspective, Twitter (or one of the other microblogging platforms) is fast becoming basic literacy behavior for the 21st Century. If I can find ANYTHING that encourages kids to write words down and send them to each other in a socially productive framework, THAT’s a win. Literacy behavior as a form of social interaction is what social networking is about. It should be part of the educational environment for a 21st Century school. If I had my way, every child in the intermediate grades at my school would have a microblogging platform and a social network presence (like WebTop) where social networking skills could be practiced and modeled, and they’d have access to a keyboard as often as possible so they could READ other people’s replies to them.
I neglected to mention that microblogging is becoming a communication tool that businesses use to to allow employees to communicate with each other in the workplace – kind of a replacement for email. A microblog post could be used instead of an intercom system for announcements (”Teachers: please keep students out of the down stairs boys bathroom until further notice while the custodian deals with a plumbing issue…“). Of course, that relies on the idea that teacher will actually use the microblog.
