Tips for Teachers Who Wish to Use Twitter in Their Elementary Classrooms

“In my classroom, Twitter literally open up the world to my students. The great thing about Twitter is it doesn’t matter with what times you’re in or what country you’re in and it is available to almost everybody all over the world.” –Karen Lirenman

, Grade 1 classroom teacher.

Twitter is a great learning platform for students and educators of all ages. It helps educators interact with students, parents and other teachers to enhance learning outcomes. It also enables educators to develop professionally through collaboration with other educators and administrators from around the world. Let’s see some basic uses of Twitter in education:

• Twitter connects educators, students and their parents on a wider level as well as on a personal level.
• Twitter makes a classroom with no boundaries as it can be accessed from anywhere using mobile devices.
• Twitter individualizes learning for each student.
• With Twitter, educators can provide students with numerous educational resources.
• Twitter gives new opportunities to connect with other learning communities and access new educational content.

There is no doubt that K12 and Higher Ed educators consider Twitter as a very useful social network to implement in the classroom. And the most interesting thing is that Twitter is now trending in elementary classrooms. There are hundreds of elementary teachers who have already started using Twitter for their academic activities as well as professional development.  EduSlam, an online platform that discovers new ideas and solutions by interviewing innovative educators globally, has interviewed Karen Lirenman about how she is using Twitter in her 1^st grade classroom. She has beautifully illustrated her ways of using Twitter. Let’s learn about some tips she has given for teachers who might be interested in using Twitter in their elementary classrooms but haven’t implemented yet.

Create a single classroom account for all students:

Elementary school students are all of ages 5, 6 or 7 years. Most of them are not in a position to maintain their own twitter accounts, so, create a single account for all classroom students, ask them to log in with the same account, and also make sure they haven’t initially tweeted anything without your permission. At the end of the tweet, ask them to put their first names and make sure they’ve not put their last names just for safety.

Unique Hash Tag:

Hashtags are generally used to gather all the tweets related to a particular topic. While creating a hashtag for your classroom topic, make sure it isn’t created by anyone before because it’s nothing worse than having tweets of others mixed with your students’ tweets.

Follow only selected people:

Twitter feeds will be watched by all your students when they log in to the class account, so, follow only those people who you think have useful tweets for your students.

Responding to Others’ Tweets:

People often wonder how to find and respond to others’ tweets. If you find a similar class account like yours, just tag them in your tweet. For example, when you’re doing Math, “this Ms/Mr. X class is tweeting Math problems, if you want to solve, tweet us back”. On Twitter, you’ll find numerous class accounts like these, engage your students in such activities to provide them with a fun learning environment.

These are the few useful tips for teachers who wish to use the great learning platform, Twitter in their elementary classrooms. We hope this information is useful for you to know about how effectively we can engage elementary school children by using Twitter in the classroom. Now, we’d like to have your opinions on the following questions.:

Do you consider Twitter as a useful learning platform for elementary school children?

What are your ways of using Twitter in your elementary classroom?

Please feel free to share with us. The comment box awaits you.