Teaching through Twitter

@  The University of Texas a Professor by the name of Monica Rankin has found an interesting way to utilize the social networking tool Twitter in the classroom.

Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded twitter applications to their computers and mobile phones while others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying. The Professor's results so far have been mixed but she is finding that more students are engaging in classroom discussions more than they used to. Students do find it hard to understand some theory as you need more than 140 characters to explain some theory but on the other hand students and the lectures feedback has to be straight to the point which students find helpful to get the gist of the theory in few tweets rather than pages from text books.

You can watch a short video on the classroom experiment below