Interactive Use of Twitter
Juniel D. Barrios
“Exciting graphics… pull your learners in, and meaningful interactions make the learning memorable and effective.”
— Tim Slade
The ability of the tools that we employ in the classroom to respond to learner inputs plays a crucial role in the teaching-learning processes. Twitter, as an instructional tool, has unique features that enable the learners to gain knowledge via meaningful interactions, and therefore learning becomes significant and relevant. Thus, let ourselves, dear ka-Tweetchers, be introduced to these features and learn about the interactive use of Twitter in education!
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Learners can reply to lesson tweets.
They can reply with text, emojis, pictures, GIFs, and videos, as well as attach educational links to their replies. Thus, teachers can include questions in their lesson tweets wherein their students can respond to and subsequently provide immediate feedback to their responses.
Teachers can also create a poll of choices on their lesson tweets in which their students can choose from as their response. Twitter then displays the number of responses and percentage of people who interacted with the lesson tweet by selecting an option. It is a feature of Twitter that can be utilized for multiple-choice type of formative assessment, which is also available in Messenger.
The duration of the availability for learner response of the poll can be set depending on the preference of the teachers. Twitter then displays the final results of the poll after the deadline.
The final results can be used to determine if the learners are prepared to proceed to the next lesson. Otherwise, an intervention is necessitated for the learners to fully understand the lesson.
Furthermore, teachers, learners, and other users can express their positive attitude towards lesson tweets by liking them.
Twitter displays the number of replies, retweets or quote tweets, and likes, which can be used by teachers as an additional criterion in grading learner outputs.
Additionally, learners can turn on the notification bell of their teachers’ accounts for them to be always updated of their tweets and activities.
Teachers and learners can check their notifications to keep themselves updated.
Lastly, tweets can become mountainous due to a long time activity, and therefore old tweets can be difficult to retrieve. Thus, teachers and learners can use unique hashtags in their lesson tweets so that they can be easily searched.
These are interactive features that Twitter has that can be beneficial for teachers and learners.
For an audiovisual discussion of the interactive use of Twitter, watch the YouTube video below.
