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Drew Adam EDU 514 Teaching and Learning with Technology 9-17-13

=Can Tweeting Help Your Teaching? = I signed up for twitter a long time ago however have never tweeted. I have a few dozen friends following me but there has been no comments for them to follow. I was excited when I thought tweeting was texting a message to a group of followers, but when i found out that you had to go online and read tweets on a website my excitement left. I do not have internet on my phone and I did not care enough about small blurbs of info enough to go to a separate website. Many in society have internet on the phones or at least very easily accessible and are on it much of the day. That being said many younger people tweet a lot. If they are checking their twitter account that regularly it would be beneficial to add some educational topics in there. Teachers can tweet each other about subject matters. Not only can teachers follow other educators and get ideas but they can have specific comments and questions to and from their students to create a dialogue which enhances teaching. An educator can tweet a reminder about an assignment the night before to those students who want to follow their class or teacher online. An interesting question or quote can be sent out before the lecture portion to get students thinking about the class beforehand. Many challenges could come from relying on this method to much. Would you count off for a student who was out of the loop since they didn’t check twitter? Would you be rewarding those who live on twitter? And how would you encourage the beneficial portion while discouraging wasting their time reading all their other tweets perhaps while they should be focused on learning. All in all this is a widely used form of social media and can be an easily used technology in the classroom. If it is to be used there should be some structure and it should probably be used as an aid not as one of the essential tools.