Inspirations from Twitter for Teaching

How to monitor what students tweet about their assignments? How to follow each student’s thoughts and progresses, with thousands of tweets continually coming in?

Those questions are haunting me all these days since I was introduced the educational purpose of using Twitter. Fortunately, when I read Teach with Twitter? Read This! by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, I found the trick lies in using the hashtag, which is the easies and the least cumbersome way to track your students’ new tweets. Once the students are asked to add hashtag on related topic, the Twitter will automatically archive their interactions and engagements with their teachers.

Before studying 35 Interesting Ways to use Twitter in the Classroom, I never think about useful ways to incorporate Twitter in classroom in that communications in classroom are through face-to-face interaction rather than through machines without actually talking to each other. However, it indeed casts some lights to my future teaching insights. Firstly, Twitter provides a platform for me to enhance learning outsides the classroom. Like what is proposed in the article, students could follow experts and thus communicate with them, which enabling the students to absorb practical and most current knowledge in related fields. In addition, they could share what they have gathered through those inspiring

communications to their classmates and/or followers. Secondly, it is a rather good tool to monitor students’ learning process. One advantage of using microblogging rather than normal blog is that microblogging appears less formal and more prompt. If the students find it is lengthy and tiresome to format blogs, they would love to tweet. As for teachers, they could get instant feedback of what they require students to do and what their problems and difficulties. Thus teachers could provide immediate suggestions to clear any possible obstacles for students.