Teaching with Microblogs

Microblogging have become popular in China in the recent two years. They are brief, immediate and convenient. You can not only view those microblogs on computer, but also from mobiles, which makes viewing and posting very handy. I really appreciate the sharing speed of posts on microblogs, but hardly ever consider its application in education. However some articles changed my mind.

   The first one, How to Use Microblogging for Education, suggests three ways to use microblogs for education.

1)       Research Group Information Sharing: The microblogging approach is great to spread information to all colleagues. And everyone can pick the information he likes and needs.

2)       Student Supervision: Microblogging is a good tool for supervision. It helps students to track their activities in microblogs, helps teachers to participate in the students’ work and understand their working process, and helps to create a history of the students’ work and the teachers’ activities.

3)       Special Interest and Projects: You can also create microblogs for everything interests you or for special purpose. And when you do not need them anymore, just end the special microblog.

Another author introduces more practical uses of Twitter for education in Teaching with Twitter:

1.        ‘Twit Board’ Notify students of changes to course content, schedules, venues or other important information.

2.        ‘Summing Up’ Ask students to read an article or chapter and then post their brief summary or précis of the key point(s). A limit of 140 characters demands a lot of academic discipline.

3.        ‘Twit Links’ Share a hyperlink – a directed task for students – each is required to regularly share one new hyperlink to a useful site they have found.

4.        ‘Twitter Stalking’ Follow a famous person and document their progress. Better still if this can be linked to an event (During the recent U.S. Presidential elections, many people followed @BarackObama and kept up to date with his speeches, etc).

5.        ‘Time Tweet’ Choose a famous person from the past and create a twitter account for them – choose an image which represents the historical figure and over a period of time write regular tweets in the role of that character, in a style and using the vocabulary you think they would have used (e.g. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar).

6.        ‘Micro Meet’ Hold discussions involving all the subscribing students. As long as everyone is following the whole group, no-one should miss out on the Twitter stream. All students participate because a sequence of contributors is agreed beforehand.

7.        ‘Micro Write’ Progressive collaborative writing on Twitter. Students agree to take it in turns to contribute to an account or ‘story’ over a period of time.

8.        ‘Lingua Tweeta’ Good for modern language learning. Send tweets in foreign languages and ask students to respond in the same language or to translate the tweet into their native language.

9.        ‘Tweming’ Start off a meme – agree on a common hash-tag so that all the created content is automatically captured by Twemes or another aggregator.

10.    ‘Twitter Pals’ Encourage students to find a Twitter ‘penpal’ and regularly converse with them over a period of time to find out about their culture, hobbies, friends, family etc. Ideal for learning about people from other cultures.

The usages and activities suggested in the two articles are useful and thought provoking. In my future teaching career, I’d like to use microblogging in three ways. First, I will follow some famous researchers in the education field, listening to what they will be thinking about education. Second, I will pay attention to recommended resources on the internet, enlarging my horizon or furthering them to my students. Third, I will consider use microblogging for assignments, class or group discussion, and tracks for teaching.