Week 10 - Section II: Ideas for using Twitter for teaching and learning.

The best way to get the most out of  a product is to use it. Using Twitter is a two part process. The first part is as a consumer, where we follow people, read their tweets, and learn from them. A lot of people stop there, which is easy to understand since that is the easy part. But the best part happens when we share, when we create and not just consume. One important thing about Twitter is to be connected and create a network. Follow some of the people we find interesting, exchange ideas and conversations with others using the #hashtag conversations we are involved in, and when appropriate, take it to the next step, connect with them, either via other social media, email, or at a place  you are both attending. Sometimes from behind the glow of modern devices, we forget to continue to forge our networking relationships in more conventional ways, too.

In Education is very important to share our resources. If we always find interesting things on Twitter, such as lesson plans, we have to share our awesome resources, too. Along the lines of the "get what you give" idea, the more we feed into the community, the more robust it will become and the more it will grow and become useful to us. There are many resource sharing sites that are conceptually great fail when not enough people contribute to them. We do not have to be a chronic Tweeter to stay regularly involved,  but it is important to check in, reply, and participate to keep the community going.

As educators we can take advantage of Twitter in many ways. For example when in a field trip, we can stay informed sick kids and parents of all our activities since we leave school. Smart phones allows us to keep them engaged with pictures and descriptions of the lessons learned. Other idea could be directed to the parents of K-12 students interested in daily classroom activities, so they can follow teacher tweets discussing some of the lessons learned and any progress on projects with one quick and handy trip to a dedicated Twitter feed. It is a good idea also to apply Twitter ideas mixing fun and education ideas like to go on a scavenger hunt. We can get students moving and organize a sort of Twitter scavenger hunts. We can even see if other classrooms or professionals want to get involved. This activity can easily be applied to a wide number of grade levels and academic subjects.

Jorge Villarreal