Many critics of Twitter believe that the 140-character microblog offered by the
ubiquitous social network can do little for the education industry. They are wrong.
K-12 teachers have taken advantage of Twitter’s format to keep their classes engaged and up-to-date on the
latest technologies. The following projects provide you and your students with
50 ways to Twitter in the classroom to create important and lasting lessons.
1. Tweet about upcoming due dates or
assignments.
One of the simplest ways that teachers can use Twitter in the classroom involves setting up a feed dedicated exclusively to due
dates, tests or quizzes.
2. Provide the class with a running news feed.
Subscribe to different mainstream and independent news feeds
with different biases as a way to compare and contrast how different
perspectives interpret current events and issues.
3. Use Twitter in the classroom to create a
career list.
Set up an interesting assignment requesting that students set
up Twitter for education lists following feeds relevant to
their career goals and keep a daily journal on any trends that crop up along
the way.
4. Track memes.
As inane as Justin Bieber’s popularity is, at least an educational
opportunity lurks around the corner. Instructors concerned with communication
and sociology issues can easily find a number of different lessons on ideas
engaging Twitter for teachers and fads spread throughout
different media sources.
5. Coordinate assignments.
Rather than keeping up with an e-mail train, students can use
Twitter to collaborate on different projects and keep a quick reference on any
changes.
6. Track a hash tag.
More ambitious educators may want to incorporate Twitter in
lessons that track hash tags for another interesting lesson in how trends
spread and the various ways in which people use social media to communicate
ideas.
7. Connect with the community.
Partner up with local government or charitable organizations and
use education Twitter to reach a broad audience discussing the
latest cultural or educational events in the area and encourage others in the
community to attend.
8. Follow the issues.
Bring a little technology into debates by asking the class which issues they would
like to follow. Subscribe to relevant hash tags and accounts from all
perspectives and compile an updated resource cobbling together as much research
as possible.
9. Write a story or poem.
Many writers and poets have experimented with Twitter’s
140-character format to bring new, serialized works in small chunks to
attention-divided audiences. Some educators may like the idea of asking their
students to apply their creative writing skills to a restrictive social media
outlet.
10. Live tweet field trips.
Sick kids or paranoid parents may like the idea of following
along with class field trips on Twitter, and smart phone-enabled teachers can
keep them engaged with pictures and descriptions of the lessons learned.
11. Ask questions.
12. Set up a foreign language news stream.
Keep foreign language students informed of current events from
relevant nations while simultaneously challenging them to use their translation
skills by keeping a specific news feed.
13. Role play.
Computer-savvy teachers can keep history lessons engaging for
children by asking them to tweet ideas and quotes from their favorite figures.
Alternately, they can also pretend to be famous fictional characters as well.
14. Take and share notes.
Classrooms with enough resources can allow students to tweet
their own notes during lessons and share with their peers – perhaps even
printing them out for home use if they do not have internet access.
15.
Sync with a blog.
Wordpress and other free
blogging websites sync with Twitter, posting notices of new entries. Educators
who require students to keep their own blogs may want to follow updates using
Twitter rather than having to click through bookmarks for each one.
16.
Chat with industry professionals.
Older high school students
who need to explore their career options before spiriting away to college
benefit from real-world discussions with professionals in paths they’re
considering. Twitter helps them connect with primary sources and facilitates
educational communication.
17.
Connect classrooms.
Teachers and students from
around the world can collaborate on projects using Twitter as a communication
tool that simultaneously educates students in different classroom and cultural
protocols.
18.
Facilitate research.
Typing keywords into
Twitter’s search engine wields every micro-blog entry on the subject, providing
an excellent way for students to research ideas, opinions and movements as they
happen.
19.
Engage parents.
Parents of K-12 students
interested in daily classroom activities can follow teacher tweets discussing
some of the lessons learned and any progress on projects with one quick and
handy trip to a dedicated Twitter feed.
20.
Become politically active.
Any teachers responsible
for educating kids in politics or government may like the idea of encouraging
their students to use Twitter as a forum to make society aware of issues that
affect them by retweeting relevant events, news stories, blog posts and other
media revolving around a chosen theme.
21.
Track the government.
Numerous local and national
government organizations maintain their own Twitter feeds, and educators
working within any of their related subjects may like the idea of compiling
them all into 1 convenient space for a quick reference.
22.
Write reviews.
Any media studies classes –
including literature – can use the Twitter format to write microreviews of the
different movies, books and music devoured.
23.
Post sample questions.
Save paper by using Twitter
to post up sample questions for upcoming exams for students to research and
consider without ever having to put down their computers.
24.
Post supplementary materials.
Retweet articles, news
stories, opinions and other interesting tidbits relevant to a specific class as
an excellent, convenient supplement to classroom lectures.
25.
Facilitate discussions.
Take supplementary material
postings one step further by requiring students to post their own succinct
responses to the main theses and open up intelligent discussions with one
another.
26.
Play the stock market game.
High school economics
teachers frequently use stock market games as a real-world project involving
the fundamentals of investing. Students can use Twitter to follow the
businesses, markets and analysts that help them make wise choices with their
(fake) money.
27.
Live tweet a book or a movie.
28.
Make recommendations.
Benefitting both students
and their parents, teachers may like the idea of using Twitter to discuss films
and documentaries or books to check out at home – preferably as a family. Doing
so especially benefits younger students, as they typically perform better in
high school and college if their parents are involved in their lives and
educations.
29.
Plan field trips.
Encourage parental
engagement by asking them to voice their opinions on where to go and where to
avoid when it comes to planning field trips. While it is impossible to please
everyone, moms and dads will appreciate the transparency and ability to
connect more with what
their children are doing and learning in school.
30. Design a background.
Art teachers curious about
how Twitter can benefit their classes may like the idea of asking students to
design their own creative backgrounds for friends and family – either digitally
or using traditional media scanned into a computer
31.
Compare religions.
Because so many religious
figures and institutions use Twitter to discuss their beliefs and teachings, it
stands as an awesome resource for liberal arts educators to compare and
contrast the various faiths that have shaped humanity since its inception.
32.
Post syllabus changes.
E-mail inboxes often filter
out important messages as junk and students lose papers or miss class for
various reasons, meaning that some of them may miss out on important
announcements regarding any changes to the syllabus. Twitter keeps a permanent
record of any new bits of information so nobody has any excuse for missing out.
33.
Take a poll.
Teachers who enjoy polling
their students on what activities to do or their opinions on current events may
want to keep a running tab of results they find when working in conjunction
with SurveyMonkey or another similar site.
34.
Hook up with Google Earth.
Numerous educators have
found creative ways to blend Twitter and Google Earth together for human and physical geography
lessons where they use the former’s “location” feature to learn all about new
places on the globe.
35.
Teach probability.
One immensely creative
teacher discovered a way to introduce his students to the basics of probability by
asking a broad question and charting the answers he received through @ replies.
36.
Go on a scavenger hunt.
Narrow the old, reliable
internet scavenger hunt to cover only Twitter,
varying the degree of difficulty depending on the age range of the students.
Much older kids may appreciate the added challenge of deciphering riddles that
pull from their lessons.
37.
Get a little bit postmodern.
Another way English
teachers can stimulate their students with Twitter involves having them compile and edit coherent
stories based on pre-existing tweets by other people.
38.
Channel that inner Lois Lane.
Send journalism students
out into the world of microblogging and assign them to poll fellow students or
ask questions of experts for use in assignments on trends, opinions and current
events and research.
39.
Track weather patterns.
Set up a class Twitter feed
that discusses the weather in different areas, charting the findings on Google
Maps or Google Earth and making note of the patterns that crop up along the
way.
40.
Create a character.
Creative writing or English
students of all ages can participate in making up a story character of their
very own, with each individual contributing a sentence or 2 towards a
personality or back story. Teachers can then ask them to write their own
stories based on this collectively created literary figure.
41.
Create a progressive poem.
Similar to the
collaborative character mentioned above, students can also compile their own
poetry where everyone contributes one line that flows with the one written
before.
42.
Play word games.
Post a daily challenge
asking kids to unscramble anagrams, contribute synonyms or antonyms or give a
definition for any vocabulary or spelling words as another way of getting them more involved in their language lessons.
43.
Post math puzzles.
Math, chemistry or physics
teachers need not feel left out from playing games and posting teasers on
Twitter. Like their literate contemporaries, they can microblog a daily problem
for students to solve and tweet back the answer.
44.
Post videos.
Educators with access to
digital video cameras may like the idea of using Twiddeo to
post in-class skits, walkthroughs of field trips, clips of their travel
exploits and anything else relevant to their students’ lessons.
45.
Create an online art gallery.
Kids studying art and the
humanities can curate their own shows based around creators, movements,
regions, time periods or thematic elements that they enjoy, using Twitter as a
way to show the world what they think belongs in a specific exhibit.
46.
Play with TweetStats.
TweetStats allows users to
input a specific account name and look at a bar graph of the microblog’s
activity. Students can search for tweeps in their school or town and gather data on
how and when their neighbors use Twitter.
47.
Network with other educators.
Beyond using it for
lessons, teachers who Twitter have at their disposal a vast network of
like-minded professionals with whom they can trade ideas and insights regarding
social networking in the classroom and other topics.
48.
Direct message students and parents.
Because e-mail filtering
frequently ships important messages off to the trash can, some educators may
prefer talking privately with kids and their parents via the direct message
feature on Twitter instead.
49.
Join #educhat
One of the best ways to
connect with other teachers and keep up with the latest trends and philosophies
regarding education by subscribing to the #educhat hash tag and participating in the community.
50.
Summarize.
At the conclusion of each
lecture, ask students to type a 140-character or less summary of what they have
learned and perhaps pose any questions to be considered in the next class.
Using Twitter in the
classroom is limited
only by an educator’s imagination. Though many believe its limitations prevent
valuable applications to an academic setting, teachers in the know have learned
that using Twitter in education can establish a nurturing classroom
for students of all ages.
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