3 scenarios for using Twitter with your students at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

Although I said in this post that I was going to start using Twitter with my Year 10 (now Year 11) students, I never actually got round to doing it. Now that they’re finishing off their last taught module before their final piece of coursework, I’m thinking about revision.

I remember ten years ago when I was doing the same course - with limited Internet access and no Wikipedia, granted - being stuck with fairly simple questions during revision and having nowhere to quickly turn. Yes, I could have gone downstairs and dusted off the huge atlases and maps to find out, but this would take a long time. By the time I’d clarified a simple point, the kitchen (and more importantly, the fridge) was beckoning. You know how it is for teenagers…

Or, if that doesn’t strike a chord, how about this: I (and I expect you) know of very few teenagers who don’t have a mobile phone. Sometimes other people are using the family computer. And if they’re not, can take time to turn on, login to email, send the email, etc. Then you have to wait by the computer for a reply (if it’s urgent). Using a mobile phone is a much better way of doing things as you can be working wherever you want whilst you wait for that update.

Which brings me to Twitter. You can get SMS notifications of when your ‘friends’ update their Twitter accounts. You can also send messages to Twitter directly via SMS. In both cases, the mobile phone number is not shown. This makes it ideal in an educational environment where teachers want to make themselves available, but not give out their contact details!

Here’s how it works:

Students will first of all need to set up an account and choose to follow the Twitter username of their teacher. The teacher can then follow them in return if it is to be used solely for educational purposes.

By putting d username and then inputting the (max. 140-character) message, the details will only be sent to the intended recipient instead of being sent so that everyone can see via the public timeline. Depending on the notifications the recipient has set up (instant messaging, online, SMS, email) they will be alerted that they have a new message. They can then respond to this in a similar fashion. The best way to learn things like this is through practice - try setting up your own account and sending a message beginning d mrbelshaw (i.e. to me!)

There’s more on getting things set up on the Twitter website here.

The problem with Scenario 1 is that it depends on a teacher being ‘on-call’ virtually 24-7. Whilst we’re all committed professionals, there’s a limit to how far you want your students to intrude into your private life. You can turn off mobile phone updates by sending an SMS to Twitter saying OFF. You can then turn them back on again by sending a message saying ON.

A better solution is to encourage students to become their own learning network - similar to the connectivism theory espoused by George Siemens. Here’s how it works:

Unlike a direct message which can only be seen by the recipient, placing @username directs the ‘tweet’ (Twitter update) at the intended recipient whilst allowing everyone to also see it. This facilitates virtual ‘classroom discussion’. Anytime someone responds to you using the @ symbol, it is logged in the ‘replies’ section of your personal Twitter page. Have a look at mine for example: http://twitter.com/mrbelshaw

Twitter - replies

Having a network of learners is all well-and-good, but there’s no real reason to limit to those who participate in lessons your physical classroom. As with the personal learning network (PLN) facilitated by Twitter in the edublogosphere (usually through the TwitterFox plugin for Firefox), students can also ask questions of those they only know online. This is how such a scenario would work:

The great thing with this model is that, as with the edublogosphere PLN, there are times when some are teaching, some are at home, and some are just waking up. Thus, there’s always something going on! If there was a similarly worldwide student PLN then common targets and projects could be worked upon. At any given time, some students worldwide would be at school, some at home, some asleep and some just waking up. Together with individual blogs, Google Apps for Education and collaborative wikis, the sky is the limit!