Twitter in the classroom

Today I had an interesting exchange of views on Twitter... about Twitter. I mentioned that I strongly encourage the use of Twitter in my classes. Someone remarked that they thought it was strange that I 'interposed media between myself and my students.' Well, firstly, this sounds as though I am deliberately trying to hide behind technology, which is patently untrue. If I wanted to hide behind technology, I would stay at home, and use my laptop and 'death by PowerPoint' to lecture to my students from a safe distance. I would probably turn off my camera too, so I didn't have to shave or comb my hair. No, you can be assured that if I use any technology with my students, it is for a clearly thought through, and logical reason that supports good pedagogy.

Secondly, students are going to use Twitter and other media anyway, regardless. My view is, let's harness whatever personal tools students bring with them to enhance their learning experience, and provide them with opportunities to extend their learning. My education students are usually in year cohorts of about 180 students. Large plenaries are presented with guest speakers in lecture theatres, and then they are split into 6 or 7 smaller seminar groups where discussion, debate, and other forms of discursive learning are supported.

During the lectures, I encourage students to interact with each other and the speakers by using Twitter as a backchannel. We select a unique hashtag for the module and this is used on all the tweets that are relevant to the lessons. This means that only the relevant tweets can be shown on large screens, or filtered by individuals on their handheld devices. Most students carry a mobile phone and/or tablet computer/laptop around with them and use them during the sessions to search for additional content, interact and post messages to their student spaces on Facebook. They also use them to capture images and sounds during the lecture for reference later on. The backchannel is an ideal medium for them to engage with people outside the classroom too. On at least one occasion students have been able to interact directly with well known authors and academics who are highly relevant to the topics they are studying.

When students are split up for seminars, and where the seminars run simultaneously, Twitter is used as an addiional medium of communication, and ideas are shared between groups. Often students take and send pictures of their group work so that other students can benefit from the discussion without being present in the room. The hashtag ensure that an archive of all relevant tweets can be accessible weeks after the seminars and lectures, so that students can refer back to content that may be useful for their assignments.

Twitter continues to be a versatile tool for good pedagogy. Those who reject it as frivolous or a distraction are often those who have seen poor use or have simply not given it enough time to see its relevance.

Photo from Wikimedia Blog


Twitter in the classroom by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.