Twitter as a tool for learningScoop. Social media often gets a bad rap for being a driving force behind people falling out of touch, neglecting in-person relationships, and reducing productivity for people around the world.
Naysayers blame it for shorter attention spans and proliferation of bad grammar, and the most vehement of those naysayers believe that social media has led to privacy being a thing of the past. To be fair, there have been many times where I’ve been trolling my Twitter feed only to be thoroughly horrified by TMI moments and tHingz Speld lIKE THIZ. But if you look past the rough surface Twitter can sometimes present, you find an amazing tool for learning.
Last time I looked, there were 141.8 million twitter accounts in the USA alone, and there are 175 million tweets being published every day. Twitter is a global community, which means global perspective and opinions about the topics you care about, and outside perspective is good. To leverage Twitter as a tool for learning, I’d recommend these actions: 1. 60 Ways To Use Twitter In The Classroom By Category. Social media offers some great opportunities for learning in the classroom, bringing together the ability to collaborate, access worldwide resources, and find new and interesting ways to communicate in one easily accessible place.
Teachers around the world have found innovative ways to use Twitter as a teaching tool (including TeachThought’s favorite), and we’ve shared many of these great ideas here with you. Read on, and we’ll explore 60 inspiring ways that teachers and students can put Twitter to work in the classroom. Communication Twitter makes staying in touch and sharing announcements super simple and even fun. These ideas offer a great way to put the tool to good use. Organization Twitter’s hashtags and other tools share a great way to organize information for your classroom.
Resources Use these ideas to take advantage of the vast resources that Twitter has to offer. Writing Skills. Twitter help. MOOCs. Twitter education. Twitter for Education. Twitter in the Classroom. Ten Minutes on Twitter. In talking with many colleagues about Twitter, I often hear things like: “I just don’t get it.”
“I don’t have time for that.” “I have to many other things going on.” “I don’t have a smartphone.” “I don’t want people I don’t know to follow me.” I think the first response, “I just don’t get it,” isn’t an excuse, I think it’s an honest answer. In the Fall of 2011, I was enrolled in a Technology Leadership course and was required to open an account by my grad professor. Admittedly at first I was thinking, “this is going to be a complete waste of my time.” However, I now realize that being forced to explore Twitter and how it could be used as a means to connect and learn from other educators was completely life changing.
Our first assignment was to open a Twitter account and participate in Ed Chat. We had been warned it might be confusing, but it was like I was reading a foreign language. So, I gave Twitter another shot and decided this time I was going to figure it out! Like this: