Leveraging Twitter in Education

To ask someone to write and interact in meaningful ways in only 140 characters seems absurd at first, but there is power in the limitation. Packing deep and insightful thinking, emotional pulls, enticing tidbits, and purposeful language into a small amount of words is a poetic art. Add in the social components of tagging relevant participants or threads, linking articles, adding images or videos, and doing it all in such a way that an online presence is created that is reliable and credible, and a powerful form of communication is born.

While social media deserves some of the bad wrap it has gotten, it is a mistake to believe that all forms of social media must be banned from the classroom and kept from the hands of children. I am a strong believer in the power of social media, leveraged purposefully, for teachers, students, and other professionals alike.

New to Twitter? 
Many bloggers and writers have explored the "dos" and "don'ts" of mastering Twitter. For those of you who are new, I encourage you to take a look at the sites I have linked below as well as at my "Twitter Boot Camp" link at the end of this post!

• TeachThouhght published 100 Twitter Tips for Teachers
• Edudemic posted The Teacher's Guide to Twitter

Twitter as a PLN

As I have experienced the power of connection through Twitter, I have learned a great deal about teaching, students, educational philosophy, and how to expand my own professional network. Leveraging Twitter as a PLN requires being active and finding the right people to follow based on your personal needs. I have linked my own Twitter accounts to the right of this blog and encourage you to see the individuals I follow for a list of great places to start building your Twitter PLN!

General Recommendations

• Be selective in who you follow (look through their feed, their descriptions, and their Twitter followers)
• Dig deeper - follow links, read articles, watch videos, look through followers of followers to find other relevant individuals/groups
• Contribute by creating original tweets
• Participate through retweeting and liking tweets with which you interact

Twitter in the Classroom
Note: Before embarking on the use of Twitter in your classroom, here are a few websites and documents you will want to review and share with students and parents:
Twitter Tips for Educators
Twitter Tips for Teens
Twitter Tips for Families

Twitter can be an extremely powerful tool in the classroom. In my own classroom, Twitter is used for four primary purposes:

1. My teaching Twitter handle (@Dare2BBrilliant) is used to promote the learning that happens in my classroom. Students, parents, administrators and more know they can to go this Twitter handle and have a window into my classroom. 
2. My interdisciplinary team has both a Twitter handle (@LVTeamPhoenix) and a team hashtag (#PXTeamWin). These are used to promote team and school pride. This year we experimented with having a student-led PR team whose responsibility was to promote any kind of learning or exciting event that happened on our team. While this is still in its early stages, we will be expanding on it in the coming years as it was extremely successful!
3. For one unit each year, I assign groups of students a Twitter handle (for a full list of Twitter handles, click here). For this unit, students are working completely independently through an interdisciplinary unit with Social Studies in which they research various aspects of a country before creating their own. The focus of utilizing Twitter for this project is to connect students with outside experts and give them an authentic example of the power of publishing their work to a global audience. 
4. Hashtags are used throughout the year to link Tweets about specific units together. These hashtags are published so that students know where to go to see the most recent information about these threads. The two best examples of this are #RockMyFaceOff (a hashtag used to promote the learning that took place during a school-wide debate tournament) and #LVCYOC (a hashtag used to promote the learning in our final unit of the year where students research and then create their own countries). 
• Note: When utilizing hashtags specific to your building or classroom, be sure to look up the hashtag you want to use BEFORE publicizing it! The #RockMyFaceOff hashtag was a great idea until we realized there was already a long stream of conversation with this hashtag. Although it still worked, we would have been better off with #LVRockMyFaceOff to differentiate ourselves!

Each year, I put my students through "Twitter Boot Camp". This class time is used to orient students with using Twitter professionally and condenses the massive amount of information available on how to use Twitter to a small but manageable sampling. See below for the document I use to introduce Twitter to my students!

If you have innovative and creative ways to use Twitter in your own classroom, please feel free to share in the comments below!