 I had heard about Twitter a long time ago (some of my favorite podcast creators rave about it all the time) but until recently I had not been able to wrap my head around the potential that Twitter has for us as educators. It was not until attending a recent educational technology conference that I began to see the light, and boy was it bright!
Twitter is the best known of a new breed of web sites known as micro-blogs. Like any other blog they are a place for people to share their thoughts, ideas, or current projects with their friends and others on the Internet. That however, is where the similarity ends. With Twitter a post can take up only 140 characters or less, the size of a cell phone's text message character limit. Any new post (known as Tweets) on Twitter goes out to all of the users "followers" either by SMS message to their cell phones or to the follower's Twitter account. Big deal right? That's what I thought for many months until I discovered that forward thinking educators were actually using Twitter not just as a place to share information between collegues but also as a way for students to interact and keep up to date with their classes as well.
Twitter as a Teaching Tool?
As more and more individuals get cell phones and the acceptance of SMS messaging becomes widespread, access to Twitter and to other people's Tweets is invading high school and collegiate classrooms all over the country. Rather than ban the devices in class some teachers are using the devices to their benefit, having students Twitter answers or questions back and forth to the members of their group. At the 2008 Iowa Technology in Education Conference I began to follow a special Twitter account known as "itec08 ". Throughout the conference as people attended sessions they would Tweet about the information they found to be most intriguing, sharing their new insights with other members who may or may not have been able to attend the same session. When something interesting was mentioned other members of the group would chime in with their own ideas or with other topics that were of relevance.
If this sounds a lot like a chat room it is not by mistake. The whole idea of Twitter is to help keep people informed with instant information and to also be able to communicate directly from person to person when needed. Sending and receiving messages by SMS on a cell phone is not required, but it takes Twitter from being just another chat room to being something that can really engage the audience that is participating in the discussion. During the conference I found myself wishing that I had skipped one session and gone to another solely on the basis of someone else's Tweets. In a classroom setting (especially a distance education setting) this could be a great way to keep the discussion and learning going in between class sessions.
A Twitter Convert Speaks Out!
Now that I have experienced what can be accomplished with Twitter as a potential educational collaboration tool, I am convinced that more teachers should consider using it. If not for classroom use, at least for use as a way to easily converse with other teachers and keep up to date on topics that interest them. With the help of browser based tools such as Twitteroo (a Windows Twitter client) a person does not even have to have an text messaging plan to keep active in the Twitter community. As a result of all of this I went ahead and created my own Twitter account on which I Tweet about anything that I find interesting to myself or potentially interesting to those that follow me. I now find that if I have a question I just ask it on Twitter and usually within a few minutes or hours I have an answer, quite often from another professional music educator. If everyone did the same, the amount of information we as educators would be able to share would be astonishing to say the least. If you have a chance please take a look at Twitter and try following MusicEdMagic as well as any of the great educators that I follow. Try it, and don't be afraid to join in!
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