My Experience with Twitter
Personally, I am new with Twitter. From my experience, I found that Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all over the world that allows them to share and discover what’s happening right now. In short, it is a new means of communication that allows the sharing of information on the internet. I noticed that Twitter is developed in the microblogging format, i.e., a system that allows sending and receiving small messages (textual and audiovisual) in real time. I also noticed that Twitter provides the emergence of collaborative environments, and it is an efficient tool in establishing professional networks.
Twitter in the Classroom and for Professional Development
Incorporating Twitter into the context of the pedagogy can be helpful for teachers in the sense that it can be a new form of professional development, without losing the educational character of their practice. It will help me as a future teacher to stimulate and improve the skills and competencies of this 21st century, such as communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. I think that using this tool in my future classroom will provide engagement among the students, especially when I will stimulate the curiosity of the followers by the way the hashtags will be arranged in the posts. The hashtag is a resource that stimulates the student’s interest to deepen in the theme proposed by his teacher. When correctly published, hashtags become aggregators of content blocks (hyperlinks) that take the user to a page with other publications related to the same theme within Twitter or to another network, media, or digital platform.
Why Twitter is a useful tool ?
- One of the great advantages of using Twitter as a teaching tool is the fact that the users’ profiles and their posts can be accessed by anyone, even if this person is not a user of the service, and that the server is open source.
- From a financial point of view, this is a completely affordable resource without any restrictions. Another positive point of this tool is its microblogging feature, the information is transmitted in up to 235 characters (no space), the student will take seconds to read the message and can receive it through instant messengers, for example, while chatting with classmates.
- For the teacher to use this tool, he or she needs to consider Twitter as more than an information disseminator. Besides posting text messages, launching links to sites about mathematics or with educational games, the teacher can ask the students to elaborate tweets about mathematical concepts worked on. You can also receive it on your cell phone.