Twitter for Teaching

On the DIIGO account, I found two interesting articles about the potential micro-blogging in education. The articles are A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in your Classroom- Educational Technology and Great Twitter Tools for your Professional Development. In the article A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in your Classroom- Educational Technology, there are four aspects that teachers can use twitter to assist their teaching: communication, resources, writing skills and twitter experience.

I found all of them are very fascinating, but considered to my future teaching context which I want to go back to China to teach high school students English, I'm really interested in silencing blurters, assignment coordinator and parent communication. First of all, in China, our class settings in high school are not that interactive and cooperative like it does in America. However, language learning is about communicating with other people. So I will primarily focus on communicative use of twitter in my class. Since our class settings are not interactive, students in China don't like interact with teachers, they only answer questions when teacher ask them to answer. Thus, most of them are silencing blurters in the class. While through twitter, I can encourage my students who have trouble with disruptive blurting, allow them to instantly tweet their blurts silently instead of out loud. They will feel much more comfortable and encouraged to speak online and if the result is good, that will also be a good motivation for them in language learning. Second, Assignment coordination is an efficient way for students to exchange ideas instead of emailing each other or waiting to meet in class. They can collaborate on projects and keep track of changes by using a Twitter hashtag. In this digital world, young people checked their mobile phone maybe every half an hour. By using twitter on their assignment is much more time saving and it's convenient for them to update their assignment anywhere anytime. Finally, twitter can also be the platform for parents to follow what's going on in the class. Our teaching is becoming more and more transparency so that we can break the gap between students and their parents.In article Great Twitter Tools for you Professional Development, I'm interested in youtwit. 

You Twit allows users to find trending YouTube videos on Twitter. These videos are sorted according to their popularity which is measured by the number of tweets they get. For a language class, it's also important that we apply multimedia to get students more engaged in class. When it comes to language learning, it's not only about linguistic system acquisition, but also about culture acquisition. In order to teaching cultures, we can show students trending YouTube videos related to politics, entertainments, traditional festivals and so on through youtwit. And since the videos are sorted according to their popularity among students, it is helpful for teacher to choose future visual teaching material for further teaching.