Twitter and Education

This week in our online Technology Tools course, we told to create a Twitter handle and experience posting/retweeting/following/hastags.  From this experience we went through a critical thinking exercise, analyzing whether or not Twitter could meet an instrctructional need and whether or not it fits with our pedagogy.  In short, I think it does fit a number of instructional needs, and fits well with my pedagogy... Here was my answer:

Twitter would work very well for meeting an instructional need.  Part of being an active professor is to supply resources and announcements to your students.  If an instructor were to integrate Twitter into their course, it would be a very simple way of reaching the students to send them a short announcement through the use of a hashtag and to send them instructional resources in a very easy to navigate format.  Because Twitter is very well optimized for mobile devices, and can notify students when they receive a message, students can easily view any class information posted on Twitter in a much more convenient place than most instructional online services like Blackboard or LMS.

This really supports my pedagogy because I think students should "live and breath" my courses when they take them.  Since social media has become an integral part of life in American society today, and Twitter is a leading social media service, integrating my class in some way through Twitter would be one powerful way to integrate my class into a student's every day life.