Let's Tweet!

Twitter has proven itself to be an interesting and useful tool for educators around the globe. If being used appropriately in language teaching, students would learn new knowledge and have fun at the same time. The Teacher’s Guide to Twitter suggests four tips for teachers using Twitter. Briefly, they are creating it, connecting it, sharing it and keeping it.

As a future teacher, I have an idea that using Twitter to form a study group. I can give mu students four course-related topics each week. And ask students to choose their interested group. After they form the group, each member should share a link of related article and post their comments on each others’ sharing. Then appointing one student to tweet a complete review of all the members’ ideas and sharing it with the whole class. In this process, students should first searching articles,  and then selecting the appropriate one. Finally, they should write down their feelings or opinions in correct sentence structure. The main purpose of doing so is to improve students’ reading and writing skills.

I also come up with three basic rules which are inspired by 10 Twitter MistakesYou Should Avoid. Even though there are no official instructions to teach students how to use Twitter correctly, the teacher has the responsibility to remind students what they could do and they’d better not do. 1.  Do not randomly connect or share on your Twitter without concrete motivation 2. Do not provide unfounded or unreliable information on Twitter 3. Show respects to others’ sharing and comments.

To sum up, Twitter is a wonderful assistant to support teaching outside the classroom, which is convenient and low cost than many real books and teaching materials. Twitter will bring infinite benefits to both teachers and learners only if we use it reasonably.