#Twitter in the Classroom

     After participating in the #ELLchat on Twitter this past Monday evening, I started thinking about how I would use Twitter in an educational setting. I saw firsthand how it has the ability to help educators from all over the world connect with each other and share ideas, but I wasn't exactly sure how I could use Twitter in a classroom setting with my future students. 

     A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom is an article that is presented as a list of ideas for Twitter usage in the class except that each idea listed is highlighted and is actually a link to a full article on each particular idea. While I had kicked around a few ideas in my head as to how I could use Twitter, this list goes far beyond what I had thought of. One of the first ideas I had (which was also on the list) was to use Twitter for general class announcements, homework assignments, and office hours. One of the points that were mentioned in the resource category that I plan on doing is to encourage students to follow a foreign language in their news feed. This will allow them to not only follow the news in other countries, it will also help students practice their reading comprehension in the foreign language and to help them learn new vocabulary words. 

In the article Teaching With Twitter written by Lori Stokes, she discusses six ways to use Twitter in the classroom with students. I really enjoyed the second topic she discussed and plan on doing this with students in the future. She talks about using Twitter in real time for questions and feedback during student presentations. I think this is an excellent way to keep students engaged. Often times during a student presentation the audience of students sit there quietly and may seem to be paying attention, but I think often times they are more being talked to rather than being taught or involved with the presentation. Allow students to use Twitter with a hash tag of the name of the presentation allows students to both participate and help the presenter to include additional information or the help questions throughout the presentation.

While there are two or three ways that I will focus on using Twitter in my future classroom, it almost seems like the possibilities are endless! 

My First Twitter Experience #ELLChat

  

   So I just finished my first live Twitter session. That was...interesting. I was completely lost for the first 5 minutes or so, but once I got the hang of it every seemed to flow well. Although it was a bit hard to follow all of the conversations going on at once. I am starting to think it is best to enter the chat with a general topic and then branch off into separate conversations with various people rather than trying to follow every conversation from the main feed. 

     I have never used Twitter a day in my life before and always thought it was stupid until about 45 minutes ago. I still have no intentions of using it in my personal life but in regards to educational experiences and networking I am all for it! It is a great way to hold discussions with people across your own field from so many different places without needing to meet face to face. I almost could not believe how quickly the conversations were flowing. I had expected maybe 5 - 10 people to be online chatting a little at a time. 

     While the conversations were interesting and I actually had a few things to say here and there (I felt a little intimidated at first) the layout was a bit confusing. It seemed to me like using a group discussion forum would be easier to follow. Then again thinking about it, it is sort of set up in a way that allows conversation to flow naturally among several people at once as if everyone were standing in a room having conversations with one another. 

     All in all, it was a little confusing to maneuver at first, but I found the Twitter chat to be fun and engaging! I would do it again and I would definitely find ways to use it with my students.