Integrating Twitter in the 21st Century Classroom

      

Twitter is one of Social Media’s fastest growing communication tools. Until recently, 140 characters was the limit for posting.  According to CNN Tech The 140-character length wasn't a random choice: Twitter's founders wanted tweets to fit in a text message, which can only hold 160 characters. So, Twitter chose 140 characters for the tweet, and 20 characters for the user name. According to Twitter Statisticsas of January 2018, there were over 330 million active Twitter users. 80% of users access the app via a Mobile device. 67 million of the 330 million users live in the United States. Over 500 million Tweets are sent per day from 100 million active users. 35% of users are between the ages of 18-29. 

How can Middle and High School teachers engage students on Twitter when statistics indicate that the median age group is 18 and older? One advantage for educators may be the use of Mobile devices. Mobile device use among teenage students is high. The average 15-year-old owns their own smart phone and has access to Social Media Apps i.e. Face Book, Twitter, Snap Chat and text messaging. Students have already begun to learn the benefit of collaborating through group text messaging and emails. Teachers are challenged with the task of brainstorming new ideas to stay technologically connected with their students.

According to an article by Fracturs Learning, a group of students can use Twitter for research on a particular topic and start their own hashtag to quickly and collaboratively save all their findings into one common stream. By adding the hashtag to each relevant tweet, they find they will each individually be able to search for it and see the results collected by other members of the team or class, regardless of whether they are in the same location. A great homework assignment would be to ask students to research a topic on Twitter, marking relevant tweets with a hashtag in this way and then looking at the stream together and analyzing their results in class the next day (Bates, 2017).

Select one of the  5 Great Ways for Students to Collaborate on Twitter and briefly describe or give an example of how you would integrate your selection as a learning or collaboration exercise for your students.