Twitter in Education?

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Steve Winfield Posted: Sun, Aug 30 2009 06:25 PM

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Several publications posted articles about the use of Twitter in education. Campus Technology and Chronicle of Higher Ed looked at a Faculty Focus study that concluded that only about 5.1% of educators use Twitter as part of instruction. The Houston Chronicle noted that several school districts in the Houston area are planning to try out Twitter this year. And the New York Times reported that teens are not driving Twitter usage.

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So what are your thoughts about Twitter in education? 

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Steve Winfield replied on Sun, Aug 30 2009 07:39 PM

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Okay...here are my thoughts on this.  I am not a fan of Twitter and stuggle to see its use in education.  For those who don't know, I used to be teacher and principal for 9 years before getting into education.  Perhaps the world is has changed so much that my experiences are no longer relevant, but for the life of me I really struggle to think of something to do with Twitter that woul dhave added great relevance to my class.

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AlexPearce replied on Mon, Aug 31 2009 04:46 PM

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I personally am a big fan of twitter and will also be told off for checking it too much on my phone (@alex_pearce).

From my schools point of view its another method of communicating to our pupils and parents and its also a free method (this is the only reason we use it - as below).

But there are two ways of looking at twitter from a education point of view.  Methods of contact to the outside world like parents and fans of the schools, latest news, awards, class of the week - anything you might normally put on your website for the general public.  Its another form of push technology should the user subscribe to the schools twitter account.

I want you to image twitter as an internal technology within your school.  What kind of twitter comments would you pupils have, 'stuck finding information on the #romans #history).  The history teachers could be using a twitter application such as tweetdeck to search for keywords/hashtags for romans or history and then point the pupils in the right direction.  Maybe other pupils will search for the history hastag as its their favourite subject and they help out the pupil instead.

The main problem is how do you stop a twitter conversation starting off with the first twit being 'this lesson is so boring!'

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Eckhard Klockhaus replied on Mon, Sep 7 2009 12:20 AM

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We have just recently decided to start using Twitter for our activities in the Education space. Looking at the "audience" we want to inform about activities, trends, technology etc going on in the edu market we  think the way to address the right people with the right information is kind of a challenge in our market.

We divided the target to:

• Educators (I agree with Steve, not having a huge amount of teachers in there, but maybe the trendsetters)
• Pupils (they are there - we have to be careful not to try to mix and match being cool with business topics)
• Public School authorities, such as school district managers (we thing the decision makers are not there - but the ones who take care about their IT understanding)
• Partners in the EDU market (the technical guys are there)

In addition to this segmentation we have to decide the "territory" in terms of language and news relevance.

After all this research we started with addressing our existing and potential partners in the Edu market and the IT people from public school organizations.

For now, we will not use Twitter as an exclusive information channel. We are sure the effort is not not high (cause we have to inform through other channels anyhow) and it's worth a pilot.

I would like to see what other MS Edu partners are doing with Twitter…

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