Why Twitter is great in the classroom

Download_Why_Twitter_is_great_in_the_classroom.mp3

In this short clip, primary languages teacher Lisa Stevens talks about how she uses Twitter in the classroom to enable her pupils to ask real questions from her network of like-minded colleagues about the themes they are learning. By crowdsourcing her network in this way, Lisa explains how she is able to gain authentic feedback in real time and make her lessons more engaging and dynamic as a result.

For example, she asked her PLN to answer the question "What musical instruments do you play?" and was delighted with the various responses in either English or Spanish which she felt raised the cultural and grammatical awareness of her pupils.

Lisa then goes on to say how Twitter has helped her develop professionally as a teacher and mirrors the view of many colleagues who have also made the effort to nurture their own personal learning network using the free micro-blogging tool.

To see another example of Lisa using Twitter in the classroom, have a look at her recent appearance on Teachers TV where she starred in the wonderful Online communities programme first broadcast in September 2009.

In the clip, Lisa projects her Twitter home page on the interactive whiteboard so her pupils can see her PLN's responses. Alternatively, she could have used a free PowerPoint Twitter Feedback tool from SAP which can be embedded within a presentation slide as a Flash file. I used this during my presentation at The Language Show 2009 along with the Virtual Magnifying Glass to ensure those at the back could see the tweets as they were displayed on the screen. This clip explains how to set up the slide, but first it show how to live tweet during a presentation to help the audience and others follow your ideas more easily.

You can also use Twitter as a live voting tool in PowerPoint. I remember seeing David Muir do this via Twitter and text messages during his presentation Podcasting for Pre-service Teachers at The Scottish Learning Festival 2009 and was very impressed.

For a how-to-guide, check out this link and for an overview of PollEverywhere click here.

Of course, Twitter is not for everyone and it may be blocked in your school anyway, but Lisa has certainly shown here how it can be used to break down the walls of the classroom and offer pupils and professionals alike huge opportunities to be enthused and make learning more connected and collaborative. You go girl!

Comments

[Sharon]

I do believe in the power of Twitter and use it personally to develop my professional knowledge and use it to gain instant feedback from student teachers during inputs known as back channelling. What I am not too sure about is using my personal Twitter account for collaborating etc with a class as I always believe in creating a 'class' account of any tool I wish to embed. Do children really want to see all your tweets about what you are doing and others are doing? Maybe they do but do they need to? I personally do not follow people who litter their tweet deck with 'personal' tweets which is a great pity as inside these are some great nuggets of information. So back to with children, this is a powerful tool but the management and organisation of it needs to be very clear before using rather than let's use this.

[Joe Dale]

Hi Sharon,

Thanks for your comment. I think creating a class Twitter account for this type of crowdsourcing is a good idea. You could also ask your PLN to use a hashtag but a separate account would be better.

I agree that it is important to think carefully before using any time of technology in the classroom and to check with the school's policy on e-safety before launching into anything new.

With that in mind, I think this type of classroom Twitter experiment should be successful and make pupils' learning more memorable.

[Lisa]

Hi! I have a separate account for the children now. However, the breadth of response is much lower if I use it as @wcprimary has far fewer followers (84) than I do personally (1,247), and most are UK based whilst my followers are international.

The use of hashtags has also developed since the video was recorded and my examples posted. The pupils were actually intrigued about what I did and tweeted, and fascinated by how many people I could 'talk to' at once.

So, the possibilities to use Twitter improve all the time - a long way from having to tweet from my mobile phone!

[Joe Dale]

Hi Lisa,

Thanks for giving us an update on your inspiring use of Twitter in the classroom. I hope this post will give you some more ideas on how you can develop this further.

Joe

[Joseph Lira]

These are interesting and creative ideas that work. Thanks for sharing them. I hope to see them applied in latin America soon to harness the interconnectivity of technology and collaborative learning.

Gracias!

[Jess - a beginner learning Spanish poco a poco]

hi, I never thought twitter could be used this way, I am going to share this link with my classmates and my Spanish teacher on Facebook so we can do something similar, it is an excellent idea.

Thanks for sharing, your post is pretty awesome,I will come visit more often

gracias!