If you haven’t already given in to the Twitter craze and created an account, you may want to reconsider. Twitter is rapidly growing in popularity and is recognized as evolving into a valuable tool in education-particularly higher education. Most of your students probably have Twitter, making it a wonderful tool to use to collaborate and share ideas outside of the classroom. If you are new to Twitter, you probably know the basics-sharing, or “tweeting”, your thoughts and ideas with your followers-but you probably didn’t know that there are tons of great add-ons out there that allow you to customize your Twitter for your classroom. Here are two great ones to get you started:
Considered to be the yellow pages of Twitter, Twellow allows Twitter users to browse categories and find people to follow who share their interests. This is a great way for your students to expand their interests and knowledge, and also to follow interesting people all over the world!
This is the ultimate add-on if you are an avid Twitter user already. While there are many great features of TweetDeck that allow users to make the most of Twitter, a big draw is the ability to create groups to organize and manage contacts (think organizing your students into groups by class).
Twitter has a lot of great uses in higher education, and most importantly, keeps the lines of communication between your students and yourself wide open. If you are interested in Twitter but would like some advice on how to get started, feel free to contact us!
