Let's tweet

Twitter is a hot tool for teaching nowadays. More and more teachers are using it inside and outside the classroom. For teaching, one advantage Twitter has is the instant interaction by posting and answering questions. Firstly, we can regard Twitter as our tool case. Since we could find tons of resources, such as videos and articles, related to our field there. We may also link tweets with other sources. For instance, we could put the link to our blog or diigo library to make the information available for our students. This is a way to enrich our teaching content and raise the students’ interest. Secondly, we may use it as a platform for our students to share their weekly or monthly reflection in two or three short sentences. They may write about their opinion or question towards the course, the atmosphere and the teacher. And they are required to answer one or two students’ tweets. Since the limitation of one tweet is 140 characters, they won’t be so burdened. Everyone’s participation is needed, so there will be a community of learners formed like the article Student engagement in large lectures in A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in your Classroom mentions.

What 10 Twitter Mistakes You Should Avoid refers should be brought to attention of all Twitter users. Although I seldom used Twitter before, I used Sina microblog every day. I’ve made some of the mistakes and experienced a lot from other bloggers, especially the first one Over Tweeting. I once followed some celebrities who posted several times for only one day with trivia and compliment. I believe that too much is as bad as too little. None of our followers, no matter our colleagues or students, can bear such huge amount of information. Opening up only one account, focuses on teaching, will never make Twitter a place glutted with tangle some information.