Using Twitter to Learn

Emerging Technologies at SAS is a course for students to explore current technologies. Eventually students develop a project based on technologies that are addressed in the Horizon Report on the topic of how these technologies have an impact on education. The students must interact with these technologies. To begin this project students used twitter. Here are some of the things I have learned along the way.

Goals of using Twitter

• Use twitter as a way to share information in class. For example they came up with a definition of Emerging technologies from class tweets.
• Students tweet on the research about an emerging technology and linked to the article. They needed to following requirement see below. They are given time in class to do this and must provide at least 1.
• To be able to concisely explain what the topic of the research article is in 140 characters
• Learn from each other by reading each others tweets and going to links.
• Give feedback to each other by retweets and replies.
• Use the hashtag #sasect to set up a twitter manager - Like TweetDeck and to look up their topics.
• Search through twitter for research and find experts to follow
• Use Storify - put all their tweets together to show their research and what they are learning

Things I learned:

• 2 out of the 19 had a twitter account - Not many students in the high school at SAS have had any experience with using twitter in the classroom. It has gained some followings due to events at school like #IASAS .
• They were blogging before about what they were learning but I find going to each others blog was forced and feedback not meaningful. Twitter seems to be more open and comfortable and of course they like the 140 characters.
• Have given them a collaboration grade based on their contributions to the group - some are contributing beyond that
• Just because they tweeted something does not mean that they read it - Needed to verify this so they set up Diigo and started annotating/note taking.
• Setting up was easy