Recently there has been a surge of interest around the use of Twitter and other social media tools within an education context. As this article points out, educators are increasingly experimenting with Twitter as a teaching tool in and out of the classroom to share resources, to increase communication with and between students and to prepare their students with skills for the 21st century workplace.

For Curriki members that have heard of Twitter, but don’t quite know what it is… Wikipedia states:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers).

As you explore ways to effectively use Twitter for educational purposes, take a look at this presentation by Tom Barrett titled, “Twenty-Two Interesting Ways to use Twitter in the Classroom”. For example:

• Idea #1: Student can use Twitter to gather real world up-to-date data by posting questions to fellow tweeters about location, historical facts, temperature, etc.
• Idea #3: Students can use Twitter to summarize their opinions or topics they’ve learned in class.
• Idea #10: “Word Morph”. Students can use Twitter to ask peers for synonyms and other word-related information.
• Idea #17: Students can use Twitter to communicate with experts.

As you explore the use of Twitter in your classroom, we welcome you to post your lessons and ideas on Curriki. In addition, feel free to follow our tweets here. Curriki uses Twitter to share information about education technology, to highlight resources contributed by the Curriki community and to connect and solicit feedback and ideas. See you on Twitter!

@Curriki