7 Things I Learned From Teaching With Twitter

By Natascha Chtena. Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise its not better. - Avinash Kaushik.
Add “integration in the classroom” after social media in the above quote, and you get an observation that’s at least as biting, funny, and accurate as the original. Don’t get me wrong--I do believe there’s something unique and perhaps even remarkable to be leveraged from tools like Twitter when used in conjunction with traditional courses. But after spending a quarter experimenting with Twitter in the German language course I teach at UCLA, I feel we’re still a long way from a definite “cookbook” or a set of ultimate best practices that make sense in different classrooms around the world. The past three months have been challenging, but they have also been eye-opening. They taught me many things I intend to apply to the course I’m going be teaching next quarter. Read more...