Cat Tech

In a previous post, I'd promised to discuss how Twitter was being used in a college History class. This is about just that, one, concrete use of Twitter to enrich what goes on in a classroom. Dr. Monica R Rankin is a professor of Mexican and Latin American History at the University of Texas at Dallas, and she used Twitter last semester in his US History class.

She published a webpage for her students that included videos on how to set-up a Twitter account, how to follow the class account, and how to post messages that could be viewed by everyone in the class without actually being connected to those individuals (without Friending, in Facebook-speak.)

Students would post questions during lectures, summaries of lessons learned, summaries of group conversations, or general questions about the readings or course to the stream, and other students, Dr Rankin, or her TA would respond. All of this would be organized using hashtags, a way to index tweets, making them searchable. Dr Rankin posted a website listing the appropriate hashtags, which could then be searched using hashtags.org, showing a conversation stream.

Dr. Rankin's experiment with Twitter received so much national attention, at the end of the semester, she wrote-up what her original plan had been, how it worked itself out, best practices learned, and concluding thoughts.

I am hoping to use twitter or some other similar technology in my graduate course in the fall semester of 2009, Introduction to Latin American Studies.  I hope that social media will allow students to have contact with other people around the world who have similar interests in Latin American culture.

At one of the workshops in mid-August, a group of us brainstormed ways in which we could use Twitter in class, and came up with several ideas similar to Dr Rankin's uses. There are still obstacles to using technology to enrich our classroom interactions though; namely, not all students have laptops, smartphones, or unlimited textplans - any one of which is necessary to implement uses of Twitter similar to Dr Rankin's.

Over the summer, one of the most interesting workshops that I hosted was on Twitter. After a brief explanation of what Twitter really is, we had a conversation about what each teacher was actually trying to accomplish. We kicked ideas around and eventually found other tools that would work better, given the teachers' desired outcome. However, Twitter is still a viable classroom tool, even though it didn't meet the specific needs of those at the workshop.

One of the primary advantages of Twitter is that almost every student in your class can access the service and use it - without a laptop. Anyone who can send a text message from their cellphone can send a message to Twitter. The second advantage of Twitter is that the teacher does not have to have any kind of digital connection with a student. (By way of contrast, to see students' Facebook updates, a teacher would need to connect their account to the students' accounts … which I do not recommend….) By saving a search for a keyword (in Twitter-speak, a "hashtag"), a teacher can quickly and easily see all of the relevant messages (and only the relevant messages) sent by students for class.

Curious about different ways to use Twitter in your classroom? Here is a great article with 12 possible classroom activities that use the simple service:

12 Expert Twitter Tips for the Classroom
Social networking classroom activities that employ critical thinking
by David R Wetzel

Stay tuned for a real-life example of a teacher uses Twitter with her class.

[via @russeltarr]