Twitter Chat for Education

Have you tried using a Twitter Chat for Education?   

I have recently tried it with several of my classes and I think it has some real potential.  

First, each participant in the class needs to make a free Twitter Account.

https://twitter.com/


I did the first chat face to face.  We were all in the same room on our own devices.  I put my twitter account up on the projector so that they could see how it works and also see their tweets showing up. 
I had to give them a lot of encouragement to jump in but I also found that in this face to face format the techie kids were quick to help the other kids.    


Choose your topic: Below I chose Classroom Management (I teach preservice teachers) 

Start with a question. What are your ideas for engaging students?

Then have the students reply to your question by clicking the back arrow.

Make sure you come up with a hashtag that the students can use in all their replies.  Make it something uniques to your class. That way when you search for the hashtag you can see what everyone said.  Below I used hashtag #uvuedelcm4 to designate our class.

Here is a tutorial for using Twitter Chat.

Here are some ways classroom teachers can use Twitter.

1. Monitor relevant hashtags (Think current events or even seasonal)
2. Create a classroom account all students can use
3. Create Twitter lists of accounts on particular topics
4. Build a list of hashtags and accounts for projects 
5. Coordinate assignments.
6. Ask other users for homework help
7. Use Twitter to stay on top of news events (local and global)
8. Create your own hashtag and have organized chats at particular times
9. Follow events happening in other countries (conferences, etc.)
10. Share pictures of projects and field trips
11. Ask questions of experts or others who might have the answers
12. Use it to share your classroom blog updates
13. Communicate with other classrooms anywhere (hashtags are great for this)
14. Get parents  following the classroom account
15. Review education products with write-ups by students
16. Snow day? Hold a discussion purely via Twitter for 30 minutes!
17. Flipped classroom? Use Twitter to keep everyone on track and connected
18. Students can have a ‘design a background’ competition for the class account
19. Run experiments to see which tweets get the most retweets and favorites
20. Create a fictional personality for a ‘fake’ account using a literary figure
21. Use Twitter as a research tool for students and parents alike
22. Teachers should connect with other educators around the globe
23. Follow the ‘big’ hashtags like #edchat and #ntchat (new teacher chat)
24. Discover and create videos for usage in the classroom
25. Integrate it into lessons, don’t let it become the lesson

On the first day of fall we followed the hashtag #FirstDayOfFall  It was great to see how fall looked across the country and across the world.  

Then we added our own using the #fallleaves

So dive into Twitter and try a Twitter Chat with your class!  

Click here if you would like to see some great foldables to print for your interactive notebooks: 
Foldables for Interactive Notebooks