I enjoy trying new technology in the classroom. I try to find uses for current technologies that will appeal to my students, and add a new presentation possibility to their bag of tricks. There are many free open source programs out there. Some technologies are more quickly grasped by teachers, but some are interestingly avoided. Social Networking is the topic, specifically Twitter. How can you use Twitter in your classroom or school? For students? Parents? Collegues? Staff?

Social Networking is huge! Everybody is doing it. Recently Facebook allowed users to create a username to allow a more easily remembered URL string. 200,000 Facebook users raced to claim their desired usernames in only three minutes (read more)! That’s a lot of people! Twitter has also become a very popular social networking application. According to Wolfram Alpha, Twitter receives 33 millions visits a day! So more than likely students and parents connected to your school are using a social networking app! So why not take advantage of this?

I have mentioned Twitter to some of my colleagues, and some say, “It will take too much time,” or “I don’t want everyone to know what I am doing.” They are stuck in a paradigm and need a little shifting. Instead of taking a little risk and signing up to experience the possibilities, they often shrug off the idea in fear of privacy invasion or lack of time.

Twitter has become a valuable resource to me. With Twitter you can share what you are doing, your day to day experiences, or you can use it as a powerful information tool. Twitter offers a real time search which is being updated every second! I enjoy web design, teaching, current news, and random facts. There are people you can follow who spend lots of time finding information that fits your interest and post links to full articles. Twitter only allows users to post 140 character Tweets, so you can quickly browse through your list of followed Tweets and decide if you want to click through to the link to read the full story.

I plan on using Twitter next year to inform parents. Teaching fifth grade, Twitter is probably not suitable for my students, but their parents could use this as another communication tool to share classroom and school information.

Sign up on Twitter and follow us, @EduTechMag. Here are some useful links that can help you get started:

http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-twitter/
http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-use-twitter
http://twitter.com/help/how

Please comment and share how you plan on using Twitter in your classroom. If you have any valuable links, send them our way.