Tips for teaching with Twitter

Every so often, I get questions from friends and colleagues about how to teach effectively with Twitter or other social media. The questions range from the simple (i.e. "How?" and "Why?") to more specific (i.e. "What are the biggest do's and don'ts?" and "What are your assignments like?").  Having spent the past five years trying to figure out what works for me and my students, I feel pretty well prepared to answer such questions.  Even so, I'm constantly learning, and every semester I make changes based on the previous semester's experiences.

Before I respond, I try to take a deep breath to ponder how much detail is worth going into, and what will be the most effective way to offer my input.  Like so many things, digital pedagogy is something that sounds simple in theory, but is much more difficult in practice.  I've found the same rule often applies to explaining it. But even if I have a hard time figuring out where to begin such conversations, I'm thankful every time they happen because it forces me to reflect on what I do, and why.  This time, I figure it's worth sharing more publicly.  Hopefully others will find something useful.  And then who knows where the conversation could go?

So, without any further ado, here are a few of my tips for teaching with Twitter:

1. Be clear about what you want and why you’re doing it.  It also helps to show them how, either with an in-class demonstration and/or through your own tweets.  They should get the hang of it after a few weeks.  If you need to remind individual students of anything regarding their conduct, try to do so privately.  Direct Messages (DMs) work well for this.
2. Find ways to bridge the gap between Twitter and the classroom.  You can start by incorporating their tweets or other related experiences into class sessions.  If you’re looking for more, consider ways to get them tweeting in class.  I do this occasionally by asking everyone to live tweet films we watch in class, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive.
3. Provide suggestions for managing their online identity and talk about possible concerns, especially when you’re requiring them to create a public account. (Accounts have to be public for the hashtag conversations to work, but private accounts might be okay for less social uses.) I always suggest students consider making their public accounts anonymous (unidentifiable name and profile image) if they’re concerned about possible backlash or self-censorship. In reality, many use their school ID, though some get more creative or tweet from an account they already use.
4. Create a class #hashtag. Alternatively, you could require students to @mention you in each tweet. This will help facilitate class participation through discussion, sharing, and other engagement with each other (likes and retweets), and sometimes even with accounts outside the class. It also makes it easier to join or follow the conversation.
5. Be ready for hiccups to occur. Students who tweet from a newly created but incomplete profile (no user image, bio, following, followers, tweets, etc.) often have a hard time getting their tweets to show up on the #hashtag, even when they’re tweeting properly.  I’ve speculated that this is due to Twitter’s algorithms filtering out tweets from new accounts they expect to be spam, although I’ve never been able to get ahold of Twitter to explain or fix. The problem usually goes away within a few days of completion and active use (the longest I’ve seen is a week). 
6. If you’re going to grade the tweets, consider having students use Storify to create a collection of all of their tweets. This could be done at the end of the semester, or at shorter intervals. I have found many benefits to doing this: First, it’s MUCH easier than having to search for them yourself, and doing this at the end of the semester makes it even easier to see all tweets made by the user, which may have not shown up on the hashtag search (see #4). Second, it provides students a platform to reflect on the work they’ve done. Finally, in putting the responsibility back on the students, it requires them a greater reason to “buy in” to the assignment and provides a very tangible overview of the work they have done in the course.

 
If you're still reading this and are looking for more, consider checking out a somewhat recent version of my
Twitter assignment.  It’s far from perfect—always a work-in-progress—but you’ll get a sense of how I structure the assignments and what resources I point them to (other helpful URLs at the bottom).