Web 2.0 Resources to Promote Cross-Cultural Awareness and Connections
Twitter, a Social Networking tool created by Jack Dorsey, has been steadily making its way into the world of Education. In its infancy, Twitter was similar to the “Status update” component of Facebook. People could tweet out a sentence of 140 characters or less, roughly the limit of a text message at the time. Twitter has since evolved to a place where people can connect, discuss, and follow topics from all over the world. Twitter uses tagging, or hashtags, to allow its user to locate trending topics and add their point of view to a discussion. It has become a great way to share information, especially in the world of education. It has been used for backchanneling at many events; a place where educators and event participants to post their opinions. Twitter is a place where tweets, re-tweets, favorites, and hashtags are webbed together and interwoven with our global community.
If one is relatively tech savvy, Twitter can prove to be an engaging and effective tool. One only needs an internet connection to get started. The interface is fairly simple, allowing one to simply tweet and search for hashtags, users, and other tweets. There’s no complicated profile to assemble
or unnecessary bells and whistles. Twitter could seem overwhelming to one at first, but there are many blogs and tutorials that can help educators and others find topics and users to follow and communicate with.
I’ve seen Twitter being used in many different ways in education. I’ve personally used it to tweet out homework assignments and distribute resources for my students. Other examples include teachers from around the world being able to post a question, and then having all of their students respond to the question while tagging their answers with the same hashtag. In this way, people can discover points of views from all over the world. Alan November provides many extraordinary ways to use twitter on his Blog as well. At a conference I attended, he cited an example of a teacher who went to a baseball game. During the game, she tweeted a picture of her soda cup, and asked her students to come up with a formula that would tell her how much liquid the cup could hold. Students came up with all sorts of solutions, some even taking the picture and drawing dimensions on it. Others looked into how much liquid could fit depending on how much ice was in the cup. Either way, this educator used Twitter engage students in geometry by posting a picture of a cup. That’s pretty cool!