10 Reasons Twitter works in the Classroom, by TeachThought.

1. TeachThought
Learn better.
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2. While all social media sites serve some useful niche or they’d
likely disappear, twitter has significant potential for rigorous
learning application.
Seriously.
We’ve explored this concept before, with our popular twitter
spectrum, 25 Ways To Use Twitter In The Classroom By
Complexity, and our recent 60 Ways To Use Twitter In The
Classroom By Category.

4. 10 Reasons Twitter Works
In Education

5. 1. Passive or Active Engagement
The nature of a twitter stream allows it to be
used as a passive or active learning tool: learners
can watch, skim, and surf, or tweet, connect, and
produce. This allows you, as the educator, to
plan for a variety of roles for the learner by task,
group, or as a matter of learning personalization.

6. 2. Authenticity
Twitter is a pop culture social media platform
that is used by millions not by compulsion, but
by choice. It also lacks the bleaching of formal
academia, and immerses learners in structures,
patterns, and language that are familiar. And
while not all learners use twitter, few would be
confused by it.

7. 3. Content-Area Inclusive
But perhaps a more critical matter of authenticity
is that it’s full of original, real-world, diverse and
highly-dynamic content—the opposite of a
textbook, offering reams of digital content that
must then be parsed, evaluated, and
implemented–a sort of raw materials approach to
information.

8. 4. In-Depth Analytics
While the analytics available for twitter accounts
is so-so out-of-the-box, 3rd party apps have
bolstered the digital twitter ecology. These have
powerful real-time monitoring tools that foster
complex problem-solving, audience analytics,
and trend transparency that can work for learners
in any course, classroom, or grade level.

9. 5. Familiarity
Because it’s familiar, the demand for procedural
knowledge is reduced so that content and task
can be focused upon.

10. 6. Personalization
Twitter accounts are free, allowing for the
account names, avatars, following list, and of
course the tweets themselves to unique and
differentiated.

11. 7. Accountability
Because twitter accounts are open and digital,
old tweets are instantly archived for grading,
revisiting, and reference by anyone at any time.
This kind of public display of thinking requires
planning, but with safe-guards in place, can be a
boon to the publishing and dissemination of
thinking and performance.

12. 8. Digital Connectivity
Digital platforms are connected—tweet your
instagram photos, post your iTunes playlist to
facebook, and so on. This kind of connectivity
allows more than one platform to be used
simultaneously, encouraging higher-level
thinking skills such as analysis, evaluation,
synthesis, and creation.

13. 9. Instant Audience
While students needn’t publish thinking or share
work on twitter to benefit from it, if you do there
will be an instant audience. And even if the
account has few followers, @ messaging,
hashtags, and direct access to experts, mentors,
and even celebrities can provide instant visibility
for a student’s work.

14. 10. Flexible Actuation
Even as a simple observation tool, with
categories like trending topics, #hashtags, and
lists, twitter is flexible enough to be used read-
only. And for those users who do tweet, its
original function as a micro-blogging platform
can be helpful for hesitant learners who may
write little else without the inherent brevity of
twitter to ―encourage.‖

15. Related Content
See TeachThought’s 10 most popular posts on
using twitter in the classroom
See TeachThought’s 10 most popular posts on
iPad integration in the classroom.

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