10 Reasons Twitter works in the Classroom

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TeachThoughtLearn better.

While all social media sites serve some useful niche or they’d likely disappear, twitter has significant potential for rigorous learning application.

Seriously.

We’ve explored this concept before, with our popular twitter spectrum, 25 Ways To Use Twitter In The Classroom By Complexity, and our recent 60 Ways To Use Twitter In The Classroom By Category.

10 Reasons Twitter Works In Education

1. Passive or Active Engagement

The nature of a twitter stream allows it to be used as a passive or active learning tool: learners can watch, skim, and surf, or tweet, connect, and produce. This allows you, as the educator, to plan for a variety of roles for the learner by task, group, or as a matter of learning personalization.

2. Authenticity

Twitter is a pop culture social media platform that is used by millions not by compulsion, but by choice. It also lacks the bleaching of formal academia, and immerses learners in structures, patterns, and language that are familiar. And while not all learners use twitter, few would be confused by it.

3.  Content-Area Inclusive

But perhaps a more critical matter of authenticity is that it’s full of original, real-world, diverse and highly-dynamic content—the opposite of a textbook, offering reams of digital content that must then be parsed, evaluated, and implemented–a sort of raw materials approach to information.

4. In-Depth Analytics

While the analytics available for twitter accounts is so-so out-of-the-box, 3rd party apps have bolstered the digital twitter ecology. These have powerful real-time monitoring tools that foster complex problem-solving, audience analytics, and trend transparency that can work for learners in any course, classroom, or grade level.

5. Familiarity

Because it’s familiar, the demand for procedural knowledge is reduced so that content and task can be focused upon.

6. Personalization

Twitter accounts are free, allowing for the account names, avatars, following list, and of course the tweets themselves to unique and differentiated.

7.  Accountability

Because twitter accounts are open and digital, old tweets are instantly archived for grading, revisiting, and reference by anyone at any time. This kind of public display of thinking requires planning, but with safe-guards in place, can be a boon to the publishing and dissemination of thinking and performance.

8. Digital Connectivity

Digital platforms are connected—tweet your instagram photos, post your iTunes playlist to facebook, and so on. This kind of connectivity allows more than one platform to be used simultaneously, encouraging higher-level thinking skills such as analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and creation.

9. Instant Audience

While students needn’t publish thinking or share work on twitter to benefit from it, if you do there will be an instant audience. And even if the account has few followers, @ messaging, hashtags, and direct access to experts, mentors, and even celebrities can provide instant visibility for a student’s work.

10. Flexible Actuation

Even as a simple observation tool, with categories like trending topics, #hashtags, and lists, twitter is flexible enough to be used read-only. And for those users who do tweet, its original function as a micro-blogging platform can be helpful for hesitant learners who may write little else without the inherent brevity of twitter to “encourage.”

Related Content

See TeachThought’s 10 most popular posts on using twitter in the classroom

See TeachThought’s 10 most popular posts on iPad integration in the classroom.

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