Twitter in the Classroom

This week saw the fifth birthday of Twitter, with Jack Dorsey sending the first tweet “inviting co-workers”.

Since 2006, Twitter has grown substantially in terms of worth and users; valued at $7.7billion with over 95 million tweets sent each day from its 200 million registered accounts.  It’s not hard to see why it’s slowly creeping into the UK’s education system.

To use the micro-blogging site as a successful and effective learning tool, teachers must be certain of the topics that would be best supported by Twitter, as there would no benefit to using Twitter if the same can be done with traditional teaching methods.

Twitter can provide insight for teachers about how their pupils learn. So much of learning is going on inside a pupil’s heads that we don’t know what they understand and how they apply this, Twitter can educate teachers into how they can make their teaching more relevant to these processes.

It can also be used to avoid classroom shyness; we all know that once silence takes over it never lets go.  Using twitter to create classroom discussions can aid learning and create a forum for pupils to express their opinions.  Furthermore, using a maximum of 140 characters to summarise your thoughts, tweeters learn to be effective communicators avoiding waffle.

For schools the most popular uses of Twitter are sharing information with both the local and wider community, showcasing the school and communicating with experts- acquiring information straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

With this in mind Twitter can effectively support learning and lesson planning. It is largely idiot-proof and simple to understand, enabling even the biggest technophobe to broadcast information.

With 500 000 new users everyday and mobile users up by 182% from this time last year, Twitter is more popular than ever.  So rather than be sceptical about it, why not post your first tweet and see what potential it has for your classroom.

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