Using Twitter in High School Classrooms

Not long ago, I met a super-motivated team of teachers from Westfield High School(Westfield, Ind.) at my Teaching the iGeneration workshop in Cincinnati. They were particularly interested in the different ways that Twitter can be used in schools. To help, I turned to the teachers in my own Twitter network for ideas—and while the examples shared were as diverse as the digital peers that I learn from, they seemed to fall into three broad categories:

Twitter can be used as a backchannel, encouraging reflection and conversation among students.

As a guy who needs to speak out loud in order to process information, I love to tweet during workshops and professional development presentations simply because it gives me the chance to interact with ideas without interrupting the people near me who are trying to pay attention.

Twitter serves the same purpose in the classrooms of many teachers—including business teacherSarah Bird, who has her students tweet the Most Valuable Point from every lesson, using a shared classroom hash tag.

Imagine how powerful that could be—for teachers and for students:

• You give students a digital home for interacting around your content—a space that they are likely to return to on their own time.

• When students can see what other kids are thinking during lessons, their own thinking is challenged. And you've created built-in opportunities for the kind of social pushing and polishing that defines collaborative dialogue and knowledge creation.

• You can treat the exercise as high-quality formative assessment. When you can see what students are thinking, you have access to immediate feedback about the levels of mastery and misconceptions in your classes—which can be used to plan next steps.

Twitter can help students develop their civic voices.

Social media spaces are changing how elections are won and lost—and how politicians operate. President Obama has initiated a series ofTwitter Town Hall meetings where he answers questions submitted through the microblogging platform. Even Gordon Brown, longtime Prime Minister of the UK, recognized that policy can't be made without listening to people in social spaces.

The result: Nearly every modern campaign jumps feet-first into social media spaces.

If we are going to prepare our students to be effective participants in this changing political landscape, shouldn't we be showing them how to hunt down electoral candidates in social spaces—both to learn more about their positions AND to ask important questions?

That's exactly what Jeremy Reid is teaching his 11th grade social studies students, who have used a classroom Twitter account to reach out to candidates in local elections.

Think about that for a second, would you?

Traditionally, learning about candidates and their positions was a cumbersome, time-consuming process. The result: dismal turnouts for elections and a heaping cheeseload of under-informed voters.

Social media spaces, however, make interacting with politicians and their ideas easier. If we care about preparing students for democratic citizenship as much as we say we do, that's a practice worth introducing our students to.

Twitter can become a place to imagine.

Danah Boyd, a Senior Researcher at the Microsoft Research Center who ...

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