Twitter in education

Rachel Reuben, writing at .eduGuru, asks Is Your University Using Twitter to Its Fullest Potential? She makes excellent points about how universities can monitor Twitter for mentions of special programs or their university, how they can set up accounts to manage outreach on Twitter for the university, and how to begin Twitter conversations helpful to the university.

What she doesn’t mention is using Twitter during class. Using the backchannel during class, if you will. I’ve been thinking about this article at Pistachio Consulting: How to Present While People are Twittering. It’s about conference presentations, but it could easily be about classroom presentations. Also worth thinking about is Olivia Mitchell’s Is Twitter a good thing while you’re presenting? One idea she mentions is the one-liner “Tweetbite” or a big concept that’s quotable in 140 characters.

What if you monitored the backchannel among your students while you were lecturing–see their questions, thoughts, confusions–while you were talking?

Is anybody doing this?

Tomorrow on BlogHer, I’ll be writing more about the backchannel. I’ll add a link here at that time. On BlogHer: The Audience is Tweeting.

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