Twitter: It Helps Teaching!

     In our contemporary society, with the development of technology, using Internet tools, especial social media becomes more and more useful and meaningful since we can not only keep connection with the world but also learn something new every day through social media. However, if we combine education with social media, what will happen? I believe that this combination would be significant.

     Using Twitter is a good example. As the article Teaching with Twitter notes, "today it seems everyone is on Twitter, following and being followed". This is true. Nowadays, more and more teachers are trying to use Twitter as a part of their teaching. For me, as a future language teacher, I believe this would be benefit, not only for me but also for my students, especially language students. I agree with the idea that Twitter provides students, especially shy students who do not like sharing their opinions or comments with a place to talk. Through Twitter, students are encouraged to share their experiences and make contribution without feeling pressed and embarrassed. Everyone in this community feels free to talk. Moreover, students can leave comments and receive feedback from others as soon as they have just posted their Twitter. An other advantage that encourages me to involve Twitter in my future teaching is that it is convenient to search or make hashtags. Therefore, during my teaching, I can easily create hashtags which are relevant to my class, and then encourage my students to join in the discussion with people all over the world who are interested in these topics.

     In addition, in the article The Teacher's Guide to Twitter, some tips for teachers who would like to have Twitter in their teaching are listed. One tip that I feel useful is to "Share Your Resources", which will be helpful for many teachers for their future development. Since sharing some awesome resources will provide us more opportunities to join in this community. Moreover, the more we contribute to this community, the more we receive from it. Through sharing, we are able to share good educational resources with other educators from the whole world. During this process, we are not only sharing but also learning from each other since different countries have different education systems, and different teachers have different teaching styles.

     Teaching with the assistance of Twitter not only benefits our students but also ourselves since through this social media, we are all involved in this communicative community which provides us with a number of awesome resources to help us improving our teaching.