Activity Guides Using Twitter on Learning

1. Answering questions: In a similar strategy to the aforementioned information gathering, some educators streamline the process by allowing students to answer questions via Twitter rather than raising their hands. This greatly aids studying, too, as they can easily refer back via dedicated classroom hash tags.
2. Enabling discussion outside of class: Create a topic and post it online and students are going to make discussion about the given topic on Twitter.
3. Announcements: Rather than sending out a mass e-mail, many education professionals find it far easier to tweet changes, cancellations and other important announcements. Definitely avoids the dreaded spam filter that oftentimes prevents students from receiving time-sensitive messages.
4. Notifications about completed assignments: Conversely, many students use Twitter now to alert their teachers about when they’ve finished their work. This strategy works especially well for online courses or classrooms taking advantage of internet-based technologies.
5. Follow conferences: Some educators may want their students to follow certain professionals and keep track of the various happenings at relevant industry conferences. The more active feeds might even provide links to streaming video or audio!
6. Communicate with professionals: Instead of asking students to merely follow industry insiders, ask them to actually tweet a response and open a discussion — or at least try to, anyways. For high schoolers and the college crowd, this assignment might very well help them discover some personal career goals.
7. Take notes: Similar to the example about facilitating extracurricular discussion, Twitter also provides a quick way for students and teachers alike to take notes. Keeping everyone organized in a list makes it easier than ever to supplement (not replace) reviews for tests, quizzes and assignments.
8. Share a story: Put a social media twist on an old classroom favorite by asking students to play some fun story-go-round games on the famous microblogging site. The first tweets a sentence, the next builds off of it and so forth; try assigning a hashtag to make reading everything faster.
9. Map trends: Combine social media and geotracking with Twittermap, which allows users a chance to plug in and track what people are talking about where. For sociology and marketing students, such technology helps them better understand demographic needs and wants.
10. Keep parents informed: When teaching the younger set, parents may like to follow along with what’s going on in their children’s day. Keep a Twitter feed updating them about the different lessons and activities as they happen for greater engagement between the home and the classroom.
11. Set up a poll: Teachers might want to set up a Twitter poll for either their students or the broader microblogging community. The applications are limited only by one’s own creativity; for an added bonus, combine the poll with some sort of geotracker.
12. Word of the day: No matter the class, a vocabulary word, book, song, quote or something else “of the day” might very well make an excellent supplement to the day’s lesson. When teaching younger kids, tell their parents about the Twitter feed and encourage them to talk about postings at home.