There is no doubt that Twitter has taken social networking by storm – providing users the opportunity to say what they need to in a quick burst of 160 characters or less. This has many practical applications, but what about education? Speaking from first hand experience, Twitter is an effective medium in the classroom. Here is how I utilized the service.

1. Create a ‘Classroom' or ‘Teacher' twitter handle.

As an educator, you know it is probably a good idea to separate your personal self from your educator self. This way, tweets to your friends will not get snapped up by your students. Use this new account for connecting with your students. Here are a couple of ideas for using your account:

Daily homework log – tweet assignments and have students follow you to get constant updates on homework.

Classroom reminders – “bring your book to class tomorrow” or “study chapter 1 tonight, test tomorrow” are ones that I remember using quite a bit.

Sharing Links – the beauty of the internet is that there are literally thousands of articles and websites that relate to your content. Share them with students via Twitter.

Analyzing several news sources – One teacher I work with pointed out that they follow several news sources (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc) and the class analyzes the twitter feed to understand news bias. Pretty cool idea!

2. Use Hashtags.

This works great if your students have twitter accounts setup and you have followed the first suggestion of creating a twitter handle for yourself. The idea is that students can contribute to discussion or ask questions regarding topics by adding a hashtag of your choosing to the end of their tweet. Doing this will let you sort tweets a little easier (as you can display tweets containing just that hashtag).

What is a hashtag? It simply means adding a number sign to the front of a one-word phrase. For instance, my name as a hashtag would be #jeffherb. Try it out, tweet something to my twitter account @jeffherb and see how it works!

A couple thoughts about hashtags:

develop a couple for use in the classroom (one for questions, one for sharing links, one for answering questions)

make them unique, you don't want to name it simply #questions because there is most definitely others using that hashtag (consider #[teachername]questions)

Research some hashtags that are being used for current events or popular topics. Consider using a site like twijector.com to stream these tweets as a means to follow a conversation or trending information on the particular topic.

NOTE: You are not given the ability to filter the tweets before students see them – keep this in mind as you may get some inappropriate tweets. Careful which topics you follow!

More and more I find colleagues joining the Twitter masses and allowing students to interact with their classroom via this method. It seems successful in that it is a less abrasive or invasive means to stay in touch. You don't have an intense profile filled with pictures of family and friends. That itself makes it easier to digest.

Interested in seeing how our building and district use Twitter to keep the community informed? Follow @DundeeCrownHS and @CUSD300.

Have other great uses of Twitter in the classroom? Let us know below.