This article is about shy students
feeling more comfortable tweeting questions to their teachers rather than
raising their hand in class and how Twitter can be incorporated in the
classroom. The article states that some students
are too shy to raise their hand in class and those students feel more
comfortable using Twitter to tweet questions to their teachers about
assignments or further instructions, etc.
The article came from a study from
Southern Cross University in which they tested Twitter in the classroom.
Students would tweet the teacher and the tweets would go directly to them in
the form of a PowerPoint. Like most Internet sites, Twitter can be a
distraction and they cited that fact as on of the obstacles they would face by
incorporating Twitter in to the classroom.
While Twitter is a great source of
media to get certain information from, I don’t believe it will ever be a viable
tool in the classroom. From personal experience, Twitter serves as more of a
distraction for random information than it does for anything helpful,
especially pertaining to the classroom.
Say a student has a question about
the topic they are currently discussing in the classroom but they are too shy
to ask it in front of the class so they tweet about it. A major problem with
this is the fact that the teacher won’t be on Twitter at that exact moment
because she will, of course, be teaching. The teacher probably wouldn’t get on
Twitter until the class is over with or even until the school day is over with,
and by then the question won’t even be relevant anymore. Perhaps it could be a
good tool when a student has a question about homework or a project or
something, but that’s what e-mail is for. All in all, while Twitter is a great
new social media outlet for news and other information, it has no place in the
classroom, at least in its current form.
