One of the things I love about using Twitter as an education tool is the ability to connect with passionate educators around the world, quickly identify trending topics in global education and measure what types of information resonate with the Bon Education and Curriki communities.
I’ve always thought of Twitter as a great tool for the Language Arts classroom because the application naturally encourages users to develop reading and summarization skills—i.e. there is only so much you can say with 140 characters! (See more classroom Twitter ideas in my past post “Using Twitter in and Out of the Classroom.”)
Beyond ELA, recently I’ve begun to see Twitter as a fantastic tool for teaching math, geography, anthropology, marketing, etc. Using Twitter applications such as Hootsuite and Klout, student tweeters can do countless calculations to study and analyze how memes (tweets) spread, where they spread, who are the major influencers/connectors on Twitter, when are the best times to tweet, how changing one word in a tweet can totally change its stickiness and more!
As you think about developing lessons for the New Year, why not try using Twitter as a tool for instruction? While brainstorming ideas, make sure to check out “10 Twitter Tools to Help you Track and Perform Better“–great tools for encouraging students to apply a bit of math and science to their tweets.
Happy Twitter Holidays!
Founder, Bon Education