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While all social media sites serve some useful niche or theyd likely disappear, twitter has significant potential for rigorous learning application. Seriously. Weve explored this concept before, with our popular twitter spectrum, 25 Ways To Use Twitter In The Classroom By Complexity, and our recent 60 Ways To Use Twitter In The Classroom By Category.

10 Reasons Twitter Works In Education

1. Passive or Active Engagement The nature of a twitter stream allows it to be used as a passive or active learning tool: learners can watch, skim, and surf, or tweet, connect, and produce. This allows you, as the educator, to plan for a variety of roles for the learner by task, group, or as a matter of learning personalization.

2. Authenticity Twitter is a pop culture social media platform that is used by millions not by compulsion, but by choice. It also lacks the bleaching of formal academia, and immerses learners in structures, patterns, and language that are familiar. And while not all learners use twitter, few would be confused by it.

3. Content-Area Inclusive But perhaps a more critical matter of authenticity is that its full of original, real-world, diverse and highly-dynamic contentthe opposite of a textbook, offering reams of digital content that must then be parsed, evaluated, and implementeda sort of raw materials approach to information.

4. In-Depth Analytics While the analytics available for twitter accounts is so-so out-of-the-box, 3rd party apps have bolstered the digital twitter ecology. These have powerful real-time monitoring tools that foster complex problem-solving, audience analytics, and trend transparency that can work for learners in any course, classroom, or grade level.

5. Familiarity Because its familiar, the demand for procedural knowledge is reduced so that content and task can be focused upon.

6. Personalization Twitter accounts are free, allowing for the account names, avatars, following list, and of course the tweets themselves to unique and differentiated.

7. Accountability Because twitter accounts are open and digital, old tweets are instantly archived for grading, revisiting, and reference by anyone at any time. This kind of public display of thinking requires planning, but with safe-guards in place, can be a boon to the publishing and dissemination of thinking and performance.

8. Digital Connectivity Digital platforms are connectedtweet your instagram photos, post your iTunes playlist to facebook, and so on. This kind of connectivity allows more than one platform to be used simultaneously, encouraging higher-level thinking skills such as analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and creation.

9. Instant Audience While students neednt publish thinking or share work on twitter to benefit from it, if you do there will be an instant audience. And even if the account has few followers, @ messaging, hashtags, and direct access to experts, mentors, and even celebrities can provide instant visibility for a students work.

10. Flexible Actuation Even as a simple observation tool, with categories like trending topics, #hashtags, and lists, twitter is flexible enough to be used readonly. And for those users who do tweet, its original function as a micro-blogging platform can be helpful for hesitant learners who may write little else without the inherent brevity of twitter to encourage.

Related Content See TeachThoughts 10 most popular posts on using twitter in the classroom See TeachThoughts 10 most popular posts on iPad integration in the classroom.

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