Who’s on twitter? Lots of people and organizations. Beyond connecting people to friends and acquaintances, Twitter can connect users to movers and shakers in a variety of fields. Notice that all verified profiles have a blue check-mark next to them.
Twitter connects us to:
Friends
Public figures
Subject-matter experts
Entertainers
Ideas
News
Knowledge
In addition to connecting people to one another, Twitter is an excellent source of news and information. Twitter is where news begins. A lot of times news is shared via twitter before the news media picks up on it. Here’s an example from the 2008 miracle on the hudson.
So what I want to do now is walk through some of the basics of using Twitter. You guys are going to create and use features of your own account and learn some of the lingo associated with Twitter. After that we’ll talk about some specific educational uses for it. Let’s start tweeting.
As an instructor, Twitter will provide you with news about conference, trainings, webinars, articles -- many of them are free.
Have students recreate a historic event or tell a story through the eyes of a character in a novel. 13. Role play.
Computer-savvy teachers can keep history lessons engaging for children by asking them to tweet ideas and quotes from their favorite figures. Alternately, they can also pretend to be famous fictional characters as well.
2. Provide the class with a running news feed.
Subscribe to different mainstream and independent news feeds with different biases as a way to compare and contrast how different perspectives interpret current events and issues. Show how to embed twitter streams into Bb.
16. Chat with industry professionals.
Older high school students who need to explore their career options before spiriting away to college benefit from real-world discussions with professionals in paths they’re considering. Twitter helps them connect with primary sources and facilitates educational communication. Invite an industry professional or subject specialist to participate in a TweetChat with students.
18. Facilitate research.
Typing keywords into Twitter’s search engine wields every microblog entry on the subject, providing an excellent way for students to research ideas, opinions and movements as they happen. While scholarly journals, and library resources have a very important part in research…tools like Twitter have their place too. Students can learn when it’s appropriate to use social media to gather information.