My #Edtech #Adventure on #Twitter
- Samantha H.
- Jul 24, 2022
- 3 min read
I have had a Twitter account for many years, since 2012, but I've never been a frequent user. In 2019, I took a professional development class about using social media to create Professional Learning Networks (PLN), and at that time discovered how useful Twitter can be for networking with and learning from other professionals. I have also seen how the school that I currently teach at, and the district I work for, use Twitter to reach the community to keep it abreast of school/district events, students achievements, and community activities. In these areas I am completely confident that Twitter is a useful tool. I have not, however, considered how I could use Twitter as an avenue to reach, interact with, and teach my students.
This is where the #adventure begins. I learned several of the top hashtags in use on Twitter in the class that I am taking, and began to search for these. My PLN has grown immensely in just a couple of hours by following these leads down a "rabbit hole" that could have potentially claimed days of my life. Fortunately, I was given a deadline, so I couldn't stay in #twitterland forever. I first searched for the most obvious hashtags including: #edtech, #educator, #librarians, #web2, and #itse. I ended up learning about cryptocurrency, web 3.0, and found a couple of new-to-me edtech consultants, authors, and books to follow up on; a fruitful safari through the Twitter jungle.
Even with all of this I was not able to think of ways to incorporate Twitter into my classroom. I wondered to myself if this was an issue of compatibility, I teach secondary math, or the lack of examples I've been exposed to that would demonstrate successful use of Twitter as a teaching type tool. This did lead me to an interesting question: "Do high school/ junior high students use Twitter in their free time"? A quick Google search lead me to the graphic below:
Though this graphic focuses on adults, it makes it clear that younger audiences are more interested in TikTok and Instagram than Twitter. It also shows that Twitter users, in addition to being older, also tend to be more educated, and in a higher income bracket than users of other platforms. For these reasons I started to understand why I haven't been able to find great example of using Twitter in the secondary classroom (most of our students aren't there).
I went back to Google and searched, "how can teachers use Twitter to teach students", and this lead me to the following article:
"Fifteen Ways to Use Twitter in Education (For Students and Teacher Alike)"
This article suggested many ways to incorporate Twitter into the classroom including: use it to Tweet out homework assignments, allow students to collaborate with each other, create a class Twitter account, and then sync your class account to a relevant blog. Building upon these ideas I had the thought of using this as a way to reach students with daily math challenges, puzzles, and riddles, and also reminding students of upcoming #MAA (Mathematics Association of America) activates and opportunities available through the school. These are great uses for this platform, but since it is not censored or monitored by the teacher/district, there is no guarantee that the students will only view content that is relevant to the class, or approved by their parents. I feel like there other platforms available for teachers and students to use that are easy to control, monitor/mediate, and are more functional for the classroom setting. Additionally, since the data shows that the majority of younger internet users are not already Twitter users, the argument that students will not have to add ANOTHER app for their classes is refuted.
Twitter is an excellent social media app for professionals, older adults, and post-secondary students for networking and learning, but I do not think that it is as useful or functional for classroom use as other Web 2.0 technologies that are currently available.
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