The Twitter bandwagon

Ah, the ubiquitous Twitter!

It seems like everyone wants to "follow" and "be followed!" However, I really don't hear my students talk about it or use it as much as, say, MySpace or Facebook.

Regardless, I did speak with some colleagues a while back regarding the educational use of Twitter and have seen it in action at a couple of professional development seminars. In addition, I found the article "Twenty-five Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom", and found some interesting suggestions on how to incorporate it into the LOTE classroom.

I like the idea of throwing out a "daily topic" or "question of the day" that relates to a theme covered in class or gets them thinking about what is to come, and having students shoot out a quick response for a homework. I also was interested in using Twitter to serve as extended practice for vocabulary where they have to give a synonym for a new word, create words found inside that word, antonyms, etc. Lastly, project completing seems to be one of the most difficult battles I have with some students. I liked the suggestion the author made to use it as a "diary" of some sort to keep tabs on student progress throughout the completion of a project or even to serve as a discussion board of sorts for students to share helpful websites or even like a "Peer Help" function that we use for LAI 684.

However, in terms of Professional Development I don't know if Twitter would be the program I would turn to. My problem is (as you can probably tell from this blog post) that I sometimes have difficulty communicating my thoughts in a concise manner. I like to explain...and explain, and explain! I feel as though any discussion I may have regarding Professional Development with colleagues would necessitate more than the 140 character limit than Twitter has. For me personally, I feel as though a blog or something like Ning would be better suited to my needs. This way, myself and my colleagues could go into more detail about our discussions and attach various materials to the site for further discussion.