Twitter

ETEC 510

This page was originally authored by Mark Barrett & Sheri Johnson (2010). Edited by Kimberly Wagner (2012).

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates, often called "tweets" of 140 characters or less. These messages are posted to your profile, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search. Twitter's functions have several educational implications.

Overview

Twitter has become a powerful tool for anyone wanting to quickly share and receive information in a friendly environment: community organizers, marketers, politicians, celebrities, and educators. According to Fitton, Gruen and Poston (2009), "Twitter connects a wildy diverse array of people from all over the world, erasing barriers and boundaries all the way." The potential for educators to capitalize on this new way of connecting with people locally and worldwise is boundless.

Educators have found success using the tool to connect with students, distribute information to parents, and share and receive resources with colleagues in synchronous and asynchronous formats (see Twitter's Position image).

Twitter's Position: Synchronous / Asynchronous Spectrum

According to the "5th Annual Survey of Learning Tools" (2011) created by the Center for Learning and Performance Technologies, Twitter is ranked number one as a social media microblogging platform.

The ability to extend learning beyond classroom walls and the regular school schedule is a feature which has enabled online learning to experience remarkable growth. Twitter is no exception to this trend, and illustrates yet another successful tool in the proliferation of Web 2.0 oriented learning.

Twitter has been described as filling the gap between email and instant messaging (IM). IM is all about synchronous communication, relying upon people being online at the same moment. Asynchronous communication is slightly more time consuming, but it does not rely on people being online at the same time.

Twitter communication can be viewed in both of these two different spheres. It is a platform that can fluidly handle both synchronous and asynchronous messaging which is important because the teacher is afforded the best of both forms of communication and the ability to utilise the power of them within one application.

Educator to Educator

Twitter can be used as a way of dispersing information to other educators regarding activities that are happening in the school, but it can also be used as a powerful professional development tool between educators. Educational technology leader Principal Eric C. Sheninger (@NMHS_Principal) uses "the micro-blogging tool Twitter...[as] his mainstay for professional development" (Davis, 2010). Twitter can connect educators to other educators around the world fostering a community that provides them with a platform to share information such as interesting websites, helpful resources, and ways to develop best practices (Parker, 2011). Twitter allows educators to give and get support regarding curriculum, teaching practicies, and education related challenges. According to Joseph Zydowsky (2010), "A school administrator may find it helpful to follow local news outlets, experts in the field of education, professional educational organizations and other school administrators" (para. 6).; likewise, teachers can follow or make connections with other educators according to subject or panel to develop professionally.

Recent conferences often have hashtags for participants to follow prio to the conference and during the conference to get announcements, share ideas, and generally receive instant information. For example, Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning (ABEL) has a summer institute every August in Toronto, Ontario, and they use a hashtag that combines the acronym for ABEL Summer Institute (ASI) and the current year (i.e. #ABEL2012). It is sometimes used during the year after the conference to continue the idea sharing.

Personal Learning Network

A Personal Learning Network (PLN), is a network that links educators together with a common purpose and a shared vision. Twitter is a great way for educators to create these collaborative environments and connect to colleagues with similar interests across the teacher's school district, province, country, and across the world. PLN's provide opportunities for professional development allowing teachers to work together with other educators to create a "collective inquiry into best practices" (Dufour, 2008). Each teacher's PLN will be different depending on their subject, grade, and focus in education.

Teachers are able to share resources, ideas, questions, and challenges in a manner that is interactive allowing participants to learn by doing. If the user does not find the response useful, it can be disregarded and the next reply can be considered.

Mentorship can also be developed through the development of Twitter connections. Educators can follow the tweets of their mentor, perusing their recommended best links to a variety of multimedia resources. There are many teachers who credit the social connections they have built through Twitter for advancing their careers (Parker, 2011).

According to Davis (2010), "One of the most popular types of educator events in Twitter are 'EdChats'-one hour conversations that take place every Tuesday around a particular topic" (para. 18). This PLN was created by Thomas Whitby, the co-creator of The Educator's PLN Ning social networking Web site. Steven Anderson, an EdChat moderator, describes the Twitter experience as "a giant conference that's on all the time" (Davis, 2010, para. 28). When teachers feel isolated in their teaching, they can feel more connected by interacting with other educators in the EdChat on Twitter. The one hour moderated chat occurs at 7 P.M. EST. All participants add the #edchat hashtags to their tweets to identify their involvement in the conversation. Involvement in a synchronous conversation involving numerous people can be confusing, but using the free TweetChat application makes it easier to follow.

Resources for educators can be found at a variety of hashtags including #edchat, #edtech, #teachertuesday, #web20, #edublog, #classroom_rules, ,#social-media, #Education, #english-teacher, #followfriday, #Librarian, #Teacher. A social collaboration of education-related Twitter chats is contained in a regularly updated in an open-access Google document.

Educator To Student

Students need to acquire the skills necessary to compete with Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Twitter can be used a powerful tool for collaborative learning and disseminating classroom information; "educators are brining Twitter into the classroom in an effort to create a sense of community among students and to aid teaching and learning" (Davis, 2010, para. 4). Regarding the use of social media with students, Sheninger says, "I'm passionate about engaging students...and I'm using these free tools [like Twitter] to do it." At Flint Hill School in Virginia, a teacher sees Twitter as a tool to make students work smarter and not always harder. It is a way to prepare them for college and a new way of gathering information.

In addition, connecting to your students through Twitter can provide an avenue by which you may reach them outside the traditional classroom, thereby offering opportunities to extend lessons beyond the regular instructional day. William Ferriter, a North Carolina teacher who blogs about the teaching life on The Tempered Radical, is "convinced that we can use digital tools to differentiate learning for students" (2010, pg. 74). One way it can be leveraged for meaningful learning is as a community building tool where student can make connections and develop their own PLNs. The connections in their PNL can be a valuable tool for their learning if they Tweet relevant questions to their learning and engage in meaningful dialogue with field leaders and experts.

Sugato Chakravarty, professor of consumer sciences and retailing at Purdue University, tested the use of a software called Hotseat which allows students to post questions and comments to Twitter (and Facebook) during his lectures. Jeffrey R. Young (2010) believes that the use of such tools "alter classroom power dynamics and signals to students that they're in control" (pg. 9). Regardless of the student's grade level, allowing them to play a more active role in the learning process is engaging and becoming an expectation of modern students who expect a more interactive environment. Even students who will not normally ask questions in class, will post their questions anonomously because there's no fear of embarrassment or uncertainty (Young, 2010). Although classroom management can be more complicated, the classroom learning can turn in meaningful directions that could never be anticipated.

Traditional classrooms have been progressively summoned to find new ways to prepare their students for future challenges. For example, according to The Telegraph, Twitter has been included in the new UK primary school curriculum. In the article, it is suggested that children should be able to "organise and adjust" speaking and writing skills depending on the technology being used, including using "emails, messaging, wikis and twitters". Moreover, during the primary years, children should also be taught to speak, write and broadcast using "blogs, podcasts, websites, email [and] video". Twitter helps fulfill these prescribed learning outcomes.

In a seven week study, researchers at the Shanghai Jiao Tong Distance College found that Twitter was a useful tool in their EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom by actively promoting ways for students to express themselves. Students in this study were in a blended classroom, which consisted of students attending in person, attending virtually by browser or by watching a streaming lecture, with class sizes ranging from 80-120 students. Even in such large classes, Twitter allowed all students to participate in discussions and become part of the class community. Twitter's accessibility was also useful for students in this class as students could send and receive messages almost anywhere using mobile phones or computers. The 140 character limit of a 'tweet' was encouraging for all students, regardless of English level.

According to Grosseck & Holotescu (2009) Twitter can help create a classroom community, encourage collaborative writing, allow for reader response, allows for collaboration across schools, is a valuable tool for assessing opinion, and can help students summarize their thoughts in order to fit the set character limit.

Twitter represents one facet of the dramatic departure from the traditional "sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side" style of teaching which has found new momentum and support among professionals who espouse pedagogically sound teaching practices. John Dewey is quoted as saying, “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.”

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There are many ways in which you can constructively connect with your students using Twitter:

Classroom Uses

Collaboration

Connections can be made with other classes and students in the world to expand the students' world views. Being connected with the members of the class can be beneficial as well for organizing study groups and social collaboration.

A Sample PollDaddy Poll.

Polling

Ask student their opinions or get feedback on future projects or topics. Although this can be done directly in Twitter if you take the time to self-tabulate the results; however, two better options for simple polls are the external applications Twittpoll and Poll Daddy. If you want to get answers to more than one question (i.e. multi-question survey), use a Google Form (which is part of Google Documents) or Survey Monkey instead. Provide the link through your Twitter account and the results will be available in the external application account.

Daily Learning Tool

A Twitter feed can be used during class, or after class, to allow students to Tweet questions. These questions can be addressed during class to initiate or influence the discussion. Dr. Rankin's (n.d.) Twitter experiment at UT Dallas is an excellent example of a Twitter in the classroom use (kesmit, 2009). {{#ev:youtube|6WPVWDkF7U8}}

Direct Messages

Direct Messages can be sent to parents or older students as a means of private communication for an educational purpose. Thse should always be professional in purpose and content.

Announcements

If the information is relevant to all students, it should be sent as a regular Tweet for all followers. Educators can send out reminders about upcoming tests, project due dates, or any news that needs to be shared. Administrators and school board officials can make announcements regarding inclement weather or upcoming parent/teacher conferences (Zydowsky, 2011).

World Connections

The live, real-time nature of Twitter allows us to get live updates as world events are happening, often before they are reported by major news services; however, major media outlets like NBC and BBC are now “using Twitter to deliver news and programming information." Tracking the tweets regarding a world event give you the most current, grass roots information available; search the hashtag in Hashtags.org, browse or search the hottest links in Tweetmeme, or search and follow what’s most popular in real time in Twitscoop. The use of Twitter gives students the opportunity to connect with real authors, experts, and other professionals. For example, in addition to having a Web site or Facebook page, authors are also using Twitter “to reach followers…in an instant without the time investment of posting to a blog". According to Zydowsky, users can “decide which accounts to follow” that are most useful for learning about current classroom concepts. Finally, Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, a teacher who avidly uses technology in Jacksonville, Florida, establishes Twitter as a ‘backchannel’ during collaborative projects with classes in other geographical locations; the students Tweet questions and comments about what they are learning.

World Communications Expert.

Link Sharing

Both educators and students can post interesting websites that are relevant to their class. When sharing websites through Twitter, the URL is often too long, being greater than the character limit. To avoid exceeding the character limit (and to adhere to etiquette), it is appropriate to use a URL shortener utility, such as bit.ly, tiny.cc, TinyURL, or MooURL.

Student Example Sharing

Use Twitter to post links to student work and promote students' success stories. Be careful to maintain anonymity if the student wishes to remain anonomous.

Twitter-specific Assignments

Help students learn how to use Twitter by offering assignments such as this one from a Georgia Southern University instructor. There's also value in getting students to make connections concerning their academic interests, for example, librarians, authors, historicans, scientists, environmentalists, or politicians (Kroski,2008). These connections could become a part of their PLNs. As Clive Thompson noved in Wired (2007), the Twitter experience is collective because "you're creatiing a shared understanding larger than yourself" (para. 9).

Royal Shakespeare Company Twittory.

Writing

English and literacy educators can assign stories or written answers that must be Tweeted within the 140 character limit to practice writing with succinctness. Twitter messages "may be especially attractive to writers" which creates " a self-imposed exercise in brevity" (Barach, 2009, para. 4). Another great English class activity is a "twittory" where students participate in creating a story where each person can add up to 140 characters to contribute to the story as a whole, as demonstrated by this example. The Royal Shakespeare Company created this unique twittory, Such Tweet Sorrow, in which actors play the roles from Romeo and Juliet in a modern context, retelling this well-known story in a new way; (Kennedy, 2010), it could be used as a teaching resource. Thirdly, students can be assigned the homework of twittering between characters of a current fictional reading-short story or novel. Tweeting vocabulary words with definition, tweeting as if they are historical figures, or brainstorming creative writing ideas are a few more ideas.

Third-Party Applications

OAuth Applications that connect with the Twitter environment have been created by third-parties for the purpose of sharing "private resources, such as photos, videos and contact lists, on another site" wihtout sharing usernames and passwords. The most popular supportive applications listed here were created for a commercial purpose but are also useful in an educational context.

Twitter Clients

Using a Twitter Client such as TweetDeck or HootSuite for PCs, and Twitterrific for Mac OS X, can make your use of Twitter more enjoyable and efficient. All of these are available as apps for hand-held devices.

These tools help to organize your followers and tweets. Instead of creating different accounts, divide your tweets into categories based on hashtags or user-created groups. Twhirl is similar to the others, but it also allows for signing in to multiple Twitter (and other Friend) feed accounts.

Sharing Through Twitter

GroupTweet You can make twittering in your classroom-group easy using this tool.

Hashalbum - Twitter automatically creates a photo gallery page which displays the user’s last 100 uploaded images. Collect images as a class in one place centered around a relevant topic.

RSS2Twitter - Posts the items of any RSS feed to your Twitter account. Another is Twitter Local which will generate an RSS feed of tweets from a particular geographical area.

Seesmic - You can post anything you want simultaneously to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all through one posting. If communicating with parents who use different social media, a teacher can have the accounts connected so only one posting is necessary to post to all platforms.

Selective Tweets - Also useful for multiple communication, install this app on your Facebook account and supply your Twitter username. Anytime you end a Twitter update with the hashtag #fb, that post will be sent to your Facebook page. You must be logged in to both applications when you post.

Summarize - A real-time Twitter search engine where you can search tweets using keywords. Another is TweetScan which also allows for tracking keywords and email alerts.

Tweetizen You can start your own group, or find groups with specific interests on Twitter.

tweetymail - Direct tweets to your email. Receive direct messages, tweets, and make replies all from your email account.

Twiggit - Let your students know about the articles you digg by using twiggit. Share relevant and current online articles that relate to course content.

Twishlistter Create a wishlist for classroom supplies using this tool.

Photo & Video Sharing

Several applications allow for the photo or video to be displayed directly under your post as a "View Photo" or "View Video" link, i.e. Justin.tv, Plixi (now Lockrz), Twitgoo, Twitvid, Ustream, Vimeo, Yfrog and YouTube.

Other Photo Applications

Twitpic - You can share photos on Twitter, or find photos from all around the world using this service.

Twitxr - Be able to send photos from your mobile phone using this app - great for teachers and students alike. With the increased use of portable devices, this app can be useful for capturing class activities, like tableauxs, experiment process, a board diagram, or steps outlined on chart paper.

References

Barack, L. (2009). Authors connect on twitter. School Library Journal, 55(3), 16-n/a. LexisNexis Academic (Canadian). Elibrary.

Barrett, Tom. "Twitter - A Teaching and Learning Tool" ICT In My Classroom. Retrieved March 3rd, 2010 from http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/2008/03/29/twitter-a-teaching-and-learning-tool/.

BOUTIN, P. “Nine Things You Didn’t Know About Twitter.” The New York Times. 2012, Jaunary 18. Web. Retrieved January 19, 2012 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/technology/personaltech/nine-things-you-didnt-know-about-twitter.html?_r=1&ref=twitter/.

Davis, R, M. (2010, November 01). Social Networking Goes to School. Education Digest, The, (3), 14. Elibrary.

Demski, Jennifer. (2010, February) Tweets for Teachers. The Journal, Colume 37, 16-18.

Dufour, Richard. (2008) Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work. Solution Tree.

Ferriter, William (2010, February) Why Teachers Should Twitter. Educational Leadership, 67 (5), 73-74. ASCD.

Fitton, L., Gruen, M. and Poston, L. (2009). Twitter for Dummies. John Wiley & Sons. e-Book. UBC Library.

Grosseck, G. & Holotescu C. (2008) Can we use twitter for educational activities? Unpublished paper. University of West Timisoara, Romania.

Kroski, E. (2008). All a twitter. School Library Journal, 54(7), 31-31. UBC Library.

Parker, Sarah. (August 12, 2011). Those who can, Tweet. The Times educational supplement. UBC Library.

Paton, Graeme. (n.d.) "Twitter is Put on New Primary School Curriculum" The Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved March 3rd, 2010 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/5050261/Twitter-is-put-on-new-primary-school-curriculum.html

Trinkle, Catherine. (2009, December 4) Twitter as a Professional Learning Community. School Library Monthly, 4, 22-23.

Twitter mobile use soaring. (2010). Informationweek - Online, (19383371), n/a. UBC Library.

Young, J.R. (2010). Teaching with Twitter. Education Digest, 75 (7), 9-12. Elibrary.

Zydowsky, E, J. (2011, March 01). Tweeting in Schools. School Administrator, (3), 8. Elibrary.

External Links

Official Twitter Page

Advice for Teachers New to Twitter

12 Expert Twitter Tips for the Classroom

29 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Education

50 Terrific Twitter Tutorials For Teachers

100 Ways to Teach with Twitter

The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter

Twitter for Academia