Twitter in Education

I teach gifted and talented to 3rd, 4th, 5th, & 6th graders. Presently, I don’t have Twitter set up for classroom use, as it is not allowed by our Board of Education. Twitter could be a valuable tool to any classroom teacher as it will involve student interaction. Students get excited about social media...so, my thinking is...why not use something they are excited about to enhance their learning experience in the classroom. I see many ways in which twitter would be valuable in my classroom.


• An announcement board

•Students could tweet about the day’s events

•Twitter is also a good way to send out extra information as you find it without filling up your students' inboxes with links. You can tweet links to news stories, important websites, or even the Twitter profiles of political leaders. You can even use URL-shortening services like TinyURL or Is.gd to create a compact version of your link so you can use the rest of your characters to give a short description.

•Twitter breeds the ability to communicate in short, meaningful bursts. It forces people to be concise and to get right to the point. This is an important skill to cultivate and assignments on Twitter give students the opportunity to work on this ability.

•Encourage collaboration and peer feedback. Post a link or a question for students to respond to together using @replies (Twitter's system of responding to a single person) or #trends (Twitter's system of grouping a group of tweets under the umbrella of a keyword). This will capitalize on the things learned in the lesson and continue active learning beyond the classroom.

•Use your Tweets to share information like:

◦the weather in your part of the world

◦what you are teaching/learning in class

◦to ask other classes questions

◦share special days

◦post links to fun web-based activities

◦write short poems

◦shared writing/shared reading

◦start book conversations

◦we can use Twitter apps like Twitpic to share pictures, etc.