Twitter in My Toolbox (Module 4)

My older daughter tweets all of time by retweeting interesting information and resources in her field of wildfire management. Even though she doesn’t create her own tweets, people follow her from many countries besides the U.S., such as Canada, Australia, and England. Her curation and aggregation of these resources has become valuable to her and others. I would like to introduce the power of Twitter to the students in my university/community college basic writing courses by adding it to my teaching and learning toolbox.

Since 2006, Twitter, a social networking site, has provided a microblogging service (Kassens, 2014). Increasingly, scholars have shown that Twitter can enhance and support college teaching and learning (Andrade, Castro, Ferreira, 2012; Forgie, S. E., Duff, J. P., & Ross, 2013; Kassens, 2014; Ricoy & Feliz, 2016; Veletsianos, 2012). After reading theses scholars, I see that I might use Twitter to share resources and facilitate writing practice in my basic writing courses. How and why I would do this comes next.  

At first, I would provide Tweets consisting of resources and announcements for students to read. Such Tweets would include credible information sources for students to use during the research unit. I would also provide supplemental resources for readings used in class (Forgie, Duff, & Ross, 2013). For example, when we read an essay by Kent Haruf, a Colorado author, I would Tweet the link to a Washington Post article written by one of his former students. After the students felt comfortable accessing and reading Tweets, I would move to having them Tweet or Retweet resources that they find online. Writing practice would come next. I would like to have my students use Twitter to summarize resources. For example, each student would choose a resource to read and summarize, and then tweet the summary to the whole class.

The benefits of using Twitter in this way for these students are twofold. First, the whole class would know about a variety of resources, and seconds, students would be practicing their writing skills in an authentic setting. The challenges of this technology are also twofold. First, the technology would be new to most of my students, as indicated by an informal poll of them; and second, the technology would be new to me, so my learning curve would be steep.

Using Twitter would increase student engagement. By engagement, I mean “interactions with faculty . . . with peers” (Pascarella & Terenzini; Kuh as cited in Junco, Heiberger, & Loken, 2010) both inside and outside the classroom. Through Twitter, students would be interacting with peers and faculty between class meetings (McArthur, & Bostedo-Conway, 2012). By using Twitter, students and instructors would be able to continue class-time discussion outside of the scheduled session (Junco, Heibergen, & Loken, 2011; Kassens, 2014). Not only can microblogging improve student-to-student interaction, thus creating a learning community (Ricoy & Feliz, 2016), but it can also enlarge the classroom to become part of a larger community built around shared interests and activities (Kassens, 2014).

Thus, Twitter would be a good addition to my toolbox for 21^st century skills, but I most likely won’t start using it until Fall 2016 as I am focusing on teaching and learning with D2L this semester. I’ll let you know how Twitter works at the end of 2016.

References

Andrade, A., Castro, C., & Ferreira, S. A. (2012). Cognitive communication 2.0 in higher education: to tweet or not to tweet? Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 10(3), 293-305. Retrieved from www.ejel.org/

Forgie, S. E., Duff, J. P., & Ross, S. (2013). Twelve tips for using Twitter as a learning tool in medical education. Medical Teacher, 35, 8-14. Retrieved from www.medicalteacher.org/

Junco, R., Heiberger, G. and Loken, E. (2010). The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00387. 

Kassens, A. L. (2014). Tweeting your way to improved #Writing, #Reflection, and #Community. Journal of Economic Education, 45(2), 101-109. doi:10.1080/00220485.2014.889937

Ricoy, M., & Feliz, T. (2016). Twitter as a learning community in higher education. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 19(1), 237-248. Retrieved from www.ifets.info/

McArthur, J. A., & Bostedo-Conway, K. (2012). Exploring the relationship between student-instructor interaction on Twitter and student perceptions of teacher behaviors. International Journal of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, 24(3), 286-292. Retrieved from www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/

Veletsianos, G. (2012). Higher education scholars' participation and practices on Twitter. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28(4), 336-349. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00449.x