Changing Your Mind About Twitter in the Classroom

Teacher A: "Twitter is only social media, it has no educational value."

Teacher B: "Why should we care about what everyone had to eat last night?"

Teacher C: "How will we control what students tweet?"

Twitter can be used for so much more than just a constant feed to find out what everyone ate last night or what concert they are at. Twitter can be a an educational tool for both students and teachers.

Twitters value has so many possibilities:

• Search hashtags on research topics
• Collaborate using the same hashtag to talk about different subjects
• Share links and resources using the same hashtag
• Communicate with peers or people who have the same interests
• Teachers can post reminders about assignments due
• Follow communities of interest
• Ask questions to a world wide audience
• Participate or facilitate a live tweet discussion session
• Engage parents by having them follow a class hashtag
• Teachers can use information for Professional Development
• Use Tweet Deck to organize and filter data

*Bonus: Students do not need a Twitter account to search twitter!
Twitter has education value and when filtered using Tweet Deck it will be obvious that students can use it as well as teachers for professional development.

Here are some #hashtags to get you started:
#educhat
#edchat
#mathchat
#engchat
#muscedchat
#sschat
#scichat
#elemchat
#kinderchat