Twitter and Education (general)

What is social networking? Why has this term became so famous lately?

Social networking is a term related to the formation of groups which have a common purpose, and it depends on the type of social networking. If you are a good observator you will notice that we're surrounded of social networks in different contexts, an example of this could be seen in your workplace where you have established social connections with the people you work and you need to negotiate with them in order to achieve a goal, also in the university you need to develop new relationships with your classmates with the aim of building the learning process through the cooperative-learning and so on. But there is more...

Social networking 

Nowadays we are used to hearing about the words Twitter, Facebook, Web 2.0 etc.. Let's talk about twitter.

Twitter is a web 2.0 created by Jack Dorsey in 2006. It is a microblogging service used with the aim of communicating through a short message of 140 characters called "tweets". This tweets can be openly visible for all the internet community in the users' profile page. Users can subscribe to another users' tweets, this application is known as "following" and subscribers are known as followers.

How does twitter work?

 

How can Twitter be used for educational purposes?

As you watched before, twitter is an useful tool to communicate very quickly and to express your ideas just sendding a message through the web "tweet" on your wall or on your friends' walls. This web-based tool can be well used in education, an example of this could be the following: the teacher can send the guidelines of a homework just sendding a message and all his followers (students) will receive that message on the twitter, that way students can ask the teacher in the case they are confused or have any doubt about what the homework is.

Another interesting point to consider is that students can give their own ideas and opinions, expressing themselves. This is a good way to evaluate those students who feel afraid of speaking in their classroom and they are shy or get nervous because the possible comments that their classmates could say to them. Students also can make a discussion about a topic that attracts their attention for example, economy, politics, culture etc., and they can ask their classmates to comment their impressions about the topics.

Teachers can provide shortened links which contain interesting web sites about any topic that can be discussed in class, that way students can advance more quickly and don't waste too much time surfing on the net in class.

Another good way to learn on twitter is following interesting people, in this case Jeremy Harmer, Christiane Amanpour, Barack Obama and so on... Also there are interesting sites like Discovery Channel, National Geographic, The History Channel, NASA etc., these sites are always publishing interesting information from around the world as currents facts, history or science which could be very useful for students in order to adquire new knowledge in a easy way just for reading a "tweet".

Here you have a video in which some teachers give their ideas about how to use Twitter:

Posted by Adriana.