Article 2: The Ultimate Guide to Using Twitter in Education (read after the first slideshow through the end of the article)
These two articles talk about using Twitter with students in the classroom. Do you think using Twitter in the classroom would be beneficial? Practical? Educational? Describe one of the ideas for using Twitter with students that you might like to try.
I am increasingly interested in doing a twitter experiment like the one shown in the video above. I have been using twitter for a few years now, but primarily as a tools to network and share with my peers. For a long time, none of my students were interested in Twitter and many said it was a waste of time. During this school year, however, we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of students in our school who are using twitter on a regular basis. We estimate that about 500 of our students are using twitter to socialize and chat with their friends. It has become an easy way to text all of their friends at one time.
I have also been hesitant to use twitter in my classroom because students will inevitably be followed or solicited by spammers and other malicious accounts. I have seen several of our students who have had their accounts hacked and many more who have participated in cyberbullying using twitter. At this point, I do believe that those negative uses and influences of twitter can be outweighed by the positive connections that can be made using this service. I also believe that teachers can help train their students to be responsible digital citizens by modeling professional behavior using twitter and other social media service. Also, If more teachers were using twitter in their classrooms, students would know that their accounts and their messages were being monitored by more than one adult and they may be more careful with their posts.
In addition to the increase in communication that happens as a result of using services like twitter, you also gain the collective knowledge of all of a students' friends/followers. For example, our school facebook page has about 850 "likes." So, if I asked a question to those people, I could probably get some pretty good answers and information. However, if I ask those 850 people to ask their friends a question, we have access to nearly 200,000 people, their experiences, knowledge, and ideas. Harnessing the power of our students' networks is where I see the greatest potential in using social networking in the classroom.