Connected Classroom

When I first get in touch with Twitter and that sort of tools, I always think twitter is just another popular chat website. Never thinking about education and social media entertainment could somehow blend together. In this week, after I joined my first twitter chat and browsed several articles which concerned with professional development between education and twitter, I realized all this time I have been underestimate the power of twitter. 

First thing is, there are a lot people don't realize twitter is a powerful search engine just like google. As in one of blog It's All about Hashtag mentions that "if you know how to search effectively, you can find pretty much everything" and one of search skill is using hashtag. For example, I mentioned that I joined a twitter chat last week, which is about foreign language learning, the hashtag used in this chat is #langchat. If you need to find resources or join this chat, simply type #langchat, then you can see all the instant results of all discussions under this topic. On the other hand, you can also create hashtag, build some topics that you want to discuss with people who also interested in the same question. With the effective use of hashtag really makes you become more informed and open-minded. 

The second blog post I read is called "60 Inspiring Examples of Twitter in the Classroom", in this post, the author is quite straight forward in introducing the ways that twitter can be used in classroom. By listing and explaining 60 different ways of twitter works between teachers and students, I really inspired by some of practicals that mentioned in the post. One is "student engagement in large lectures", since how to involve many students as possible in a large size class is always a question that teacher needs to be answered (especially teachers in China, because it is normal that there are 50-70 students in one class). It is difficult for 70 students doing group work at the same time because it might cause chaos, however, if students can use twitter to participate the discussion in class, their ideas can be pop up instantly in screen and teacher can choose some of tweets to ask further explanation. The rest of these tweets can still be discussed after class due to time limits. In a nutshell, I think this is another effective way of instant communication. 

In summarize, twitter can be a good mediator for learners and students. There are many possible ways to use it for effective learning and teaching. Therefore, from now on twitter is playing an increasing important role for professional development.