Week 2 Twitter: to the extend of 280 characters

 

Not a lot of people that I know use twitter. The ones that do tend to say that it is a fast way of accessing information but at times it seems that they only see the information that agrees with theirs.  In this episode of "Oh man, how can we use this to teach?" we will talk about Twitter.

For those of you who know twitter, great! You may now leave and come back later... or if you would like to know what "grinds my gears" in a good way about it please stay.

Twitter is a platform where you can type up to 280 characters (it used to be 140) and with other tools such as Hashtags (the number key or pound... if you are young chances are you don't know what I'm talking about, just keep calling it hashtag) 

and other tools like keywords and tags you could pretty much locate any information being broadcasted live or in the past.  

How is this helpful? Well, twitter has no limitation on the creation of hashtags so you can start a conversation and use a hashtag to trace its development, discussion and exposure real-time.  

The potential of this feature, you know the feature that allows to gather voices from all over the world, even of those who are not affected by the information or event but are interested, creates traction and even movements.  Now, this blog is about the educational purpose but for the next paragraph I'm going to talk about traction, trend and presence in the online realm and how it even possible to create social awareness and change via twitter. 

Currently and without going into details, Cuba is suffering a lot of political change and people are sharing that information.  You can read about it just by searching the hashtag #soscubalibre   and find the information gathered under one hashtag.  Reading twitts can give you a scope of what is going on and inform you about the event.  There is also personal comments in regards to the event and everyone is sharing in real time and even better you can go back in time and see it's development from the beginning just by scrolling down and "back in time".  

Now back to the pedagogy and instructional methods that can include twitter.  Just as information becomes alive, twitter is able to give a face and life to educational information teachers can develop and students can interact with in real time. 

I could use that hashtag to assign students to investigate a real time event and conduct it in a way to develop a writing about the sentiment, motive and reasons of it.  As a teacher I wouldn't have to input my own ideas because the student will be exposed to people from cuba and cubans all over the world giving their point of view about the event.  

This was just a quick and relevant example on this day July-19-2021 but during a class you can connect social studies to real life events and have students interact in real time with professionals and have first person resources and artifacts provided by the people who are affected by them, or who create them.  

To wrap this up, twitter brings the following to the table: 

1. Control

users control what they search for and input also what they see

2. collaboration is essential 

avid users can interact 

3. flexibility and feedback

with proper and clear guidelines (respectful at all times)

students can receive excellent feedback from great resources

Now on the teacher view on its usage

1. subject matter

it all depends what you want... add a hashtag # + subject matter and see what you find

2. infrastructure

as longest there is internet connection and a device you have access since it is free

The only thing is that its usage has to be approved by age of student due to privacy guidelines only 13 and older can open an account so elementary levels like myself will  have to come up with another program more kid friendly and secure.