I love twitter. I think it's great. The information you can get in 140 characters or less is actually quite surprising and having such limited space to construct your thoughts make going through your timeline quick and easy.
Twitter has an extremely wide variety of accounts. There are news, sports, humour, factual, personal, business accounts and then some. In fact, there are twitter accounts for the most random things. One that rings a bell has the handle @Sochi_Goalpost, where it was created after the United States hit a goal post on an empty net in the gold medal game against Canada.
The past two years that I have had twitter, it has been for social reasons. Many of the people I followed were friends, sportscasters, factual accounts and humour accounts. It wasn't until this year that I realized that twitter could be used as a resource and teaching tool, so I created a teacher account (@mrSKaskiw) where I'd follow other teachers, people in similar fields and factual or informative accounts. The biggest worry I have as a soon to be certified teacher is not having enough resources or ways of building my resources up and twitter is actually a great way to share information and new ideas. It's easy to copy a link from a website or blog to a tweet and the 140 characters acts as a sale pitch to what you are tweeting about. One thing you have to be careful about is that accounts can be made by anyone so it is just like anything else you find on the internet, you have to make sure it is from a viable source.
Twitter as a teaching tool is becoming more and more common because it is still interesting for the students and the fact that it is limited to 140 characters makes it short, easy to track by the teacher through the use of hashtags and to the point for the student. I have only really heard of using Twitter in an ELA classroom but with just a little creativity I think it could be used in any class.
Looking forward to trying it in a classroom of my own!
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