“In my classroom, Twitter literally open up the world to my students. The great thing about Twitter is it
doesn’t
matter with what times you’re in or what country you’re in and it is available
to almost everybody all over the world.” –Karen Lirenman, Grade 1 classroom
teacher.
Twitter is
a great learning platform for students and educators of all ages. It helps
educators interact with students, parents and other teachers to enhance
learning outcomes. It also enables educators to develop professionally through
collaboration with other educators and administrators from around the world.
Let’s see some basic uses of Twitter in education:
Twitter
connects educators, students and their parents on a wider level as well as on a
personal level.
Twitter
makes a classroom with no boundaries as it can be accessed from anywhere using
mobile devices.
Twitter
individualizes learning for each student.
With
Twitter, educators can provide students with numerous educational resources.
Twitter
gives new opportunities to connect with other learning communities and access
new educational content.
There is no
doubt that K12 and Higher Ed educators consider Twitter as a very useful social
network to implement in the classroom. And the most interesting thing is that
Twitter is now trending in elementary classrooms. There are hundreds of
elementary teachers who have already started using Twitter for their academic
activities as well as professional development.
EduSlam, an online platform that discovers new ideas and solutions by
interviewing innovative educators globally, has interviewed Karen Lirenman
about how she is using Twitter in her 1st grade classroom. She has beautifully
illustrated her ways of using Twitter. Let’s learn about some tips she has
given for teachers who might be interested in using Twitter in their elementary
classrooms but haven’t implemented yet.
Create a
single classroom account for all students:
Elementary
school students are all of ages 5, 6 or 7 years. Most of them are not in a
position to maintain their own twitter accounts, so, create a single account
for all classroom students, ask them to log in with the same account, and also
make sure they haven’t initially tweeted anything without your permission. At
the end of the tweet, ask them to put their first names and make sure they’ve
not put their last names just for safety.
Unique Hash
Tag:
Hashtags
are generally used to gather all the tweets related to a particular topic.
While creating a hashtag for your classroom topic, make sure it isn’t created
by anyone before because it’s nothing worse than having tweets of others mixed
with your students’ tweets.
Follow only
selected people:
Twitter
feeds will be watched by all your students when they log in to the class
account, so, follow only those people who you think have useful tweets for your
students.
Responding
to Others’ Tweets:
People
often wonder how to find and respond to others’ tweets. If you find a similar
class account like yours, just tag them in your tweet. For example, when you’re
doing Math, “this Ms/Mr. X class is tweeting Math problems, if you want to
solve, tweet us back”. On Twitter, you’ll find numerous class accounts like
these, engage your students in such activities to provide them with a fun
learning environment.
These are
the few useful tips for teachers who wish to use the great learning platform,
Twitter in their elementary classrooms. We hope this information is useful for
you to know about how effectively we can engage elementary school children by
using Twitter in the classroom. Now, we’d like to have your opinions on the
following questions.:
Do you
consider Twitter as a useful learning platform for elementary school children?
What are
your ways of using Twitter in your elementary classroom?
