How can we use Twitter for teaching and learning

This is my first time to use Twitter. Twitter is a quick, easy, and free alternative tool just like the microblogging platform networking. After I used it for a while and read some articles regarding using Twitter for professional development, I feel that Twitter can be useful for teachers to communicate with students. It can also be a useful tool for the entire class to communicate and receive announcement/news quickly. I like Twitter chats (tweet chars) which are live events where people go online to discuss topics of interest to the participants. I think Tweet chars is a great resource for professional development and for expanding our personal learning network as the microblogging platform.

I selected two articles to study this week: one is “How Twitter Can Be Used As a Powerful Education Tool” and the other is “Using Twitter for Professional development”. Both articles discuss how tools like Twitter can allow a learner to share what is learned with the world, tap the knowledge of others to help even stronger with the material, and even provide students with real word problems at a moment’s notice. Particularly I like the article “How Twitter Can Be Used As a Powerful Education Tool”. One example from the article is very convincing to me why we need to use Twitter. In the example, Mrs. Caviness was a new Twitter user who had attended a workshop of the Deduction Conference. Upon getting back to school, she told her geometry students that she just got a Twitter account. After jokingly welcoming her to the 21st century, students immediately began taking out their cell phones and following her. Then, a few nights later at a Texas Rangers baseball game, she was reminded of a problem from class a few weeks earlier. She decided to tweet the following, and within minutes, she had several replies from her students. Days later, at yet another game, Mrs. Caviness decided to dig a bit deeper into students’ thinking. She tweeted a new picture and asked students to develop related problems. Again, students jumped on this opportunity immediately. What Mrs. Caviness found most exciting was the fact that students dropped everything they were doing at home so that they could connect with her around these short math blasts. Now, Mrs. Caviness sees many applications for using this tool to strengthen what students do at school each day and to build a library of material that she and her students can use in a flipped classroom environment. If you would like to read more about her class and their uses of Twitter. You might also choose to follow Mrs. Caviness on Twitter. I really like Mrs. Caviness involving students outside the school with classwork and concepts. In this way, the students are more interested in joining the discussion, so learning process is created and connected to real life situation and problems. As Twitter is a powerful tool to involve everyone in one place to express their thoughts about a concept, this can be used to connect students to discuss some homework problems outside of the school. I also plan to use Twitter inside my classroom discussion board as Twitter allows all students to share and look for information, creative and socialize in foreign languages in a forum.