Twitter, Myself & My Classroom

I haven’t been a social media person ever in my personal life and this is definitely going to be a new thing for me to use in the classroom. Though, I have always been reluctant personally to be a part of any social media and I always believed on real community relations but I am looking forward to take advantage of it in the future. I am anticipating, it will be interesting to use twitter in the classroom.

Please let me tell a little bit that why i did not like to use it before intentionally:

It never made sense to me that why people spend their most of the time posting or tweeting their stuff online, why people are more tending to interact with others virtually. People they don’t know about, people they never met in their lives have more importance to them as compare to others who are living around them in real world, I am talking about families, friends, neighbors etc here. People don’t know a person living next to them but they know more about hundreds of those who they meet online. I am not against of making acquaintances but its just that why do we often forget about people around us. Why we are going so into this virtual world where we just get lost and then presence of others doesn’t even matter. I really like following video of Simon Sinek where he talks about millennials in the Workplace.

To be true, I never thought of or heard of using Twitter in the classroom before. The way it is introduced to me now has affected angle of my thinking. At the end of this course, I might start thinking similar to Dean Shareski  as he writes in his blog post “#socks4dean” and elaborates the power of social media in this kind of networking.

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I continue to spend much of my time imploring people both young and older to tap into the beauty of these personal networks. I rarely use the acronym, PLN because for me, the P is more often “personal” rather than strictly “professional” and the L is not always about “learning”, but for me is better substituted for “living”.

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I was searching online some of the strategies and tips in regards to using social media like twitter in my classroom and really liked this article compiled by Samantha Miller. This content really helps to know the extent of twitter’s usefulness in class. After reading this article, I feel encouraged to use it in future. Following are some of the ideas from this article that resonates with me the most.

1. Using twitter to post due dates for assignments, tests and quizzes.
2. It will provide a platform for students to coordinate with each other on assignments.
3. Using twitter to connect students with community educational events.
4. At the conclusion of each lecture, ask students to type a 140-character or less summary of what they have learned and perhaps pose any questions to be considered in the next class. (Like an exit slip)
5. Take supplementary material postings one step further by requiring students to post their own succinct responses to the main theses and open up intelligent discussions with one another.
6. Parents of K-12 students interested in daily classroom activities can follow teacher tweets discussing some of the lessons learned and any progress on projects with one quick and handy trip to a dedicated Twitter feed.