Twitter in education

As I look through more articles about Twitter in teaching, I realize Twitter is a powerful tool to improve my teaching. To be honest, I have not thought about how useful a social networking is to change or improve our education until I got started to use the Twitterchat and hashtag to search for what I am interested in and fond of. There are two articles which provide insightful thoughts about ways to use Twitter in education.

Stephanie Norman provides fifteen ways to use Twitter in education. She points out that "By using Twitter in education, you can post only a few short sentences, but that is exactly enough to transmit the essence of your message (2016)." She also mentions ways to incorporate Twitter in education. Among them, I have not thought of using Twitter to "survey students" and "write mini reviews." Teachers can create a survey and invite students to do a survey via Twitter. Also, Twitter can be a tool for students to write short reviews of a book or movie. Due to the fact that users can only post few short sentences, students can develop their skills on writing and eliciting the essence of their thoughts. I think it is a important skill that students should acquire because most of the time, we should know and be selective about which information is important or unimportant.

In addition to numerous ways to use Twitter in education, this article provides not only methods to apply Twitter in education but things that teachers should be cautious about when using Twitter in their teaching. One of the suggestions, which made me quite surprised, is that "vary the time of day of the posts." Because students may not have the same "twitter time" as teachers and students may come from different time zone, teachers should vary the post time to maximize everyone's chances of accessing the posts.

To conclude, I would definitely use Twitter in my future classroom. It provides a platform not only for teachers to make important announcement, but for both students and parents to get involved in students' learning. I think Twitter gives opportunities for teachers and students to share, inform, create and advertise anything they want in online settings-- those critical features cannot be ignored in education.