Week 7 Activity

1. Twitter as a teaching and
learning tool in the classroom

2. Headings
 Introduction to twitter as social media app for teaching and learning
 Benefits of twitter use in the classroom
 Practical challenges of using Twitter as a pedagogical tool
 references

3. Introduction to twitter as social media app
for teaching and learning
Social media “supplements blended learning which helps students creative positive
ng in relations to pedagogical objectives”, (Chawinga, 2017: 4).
Two notable distinct but interrelated approaches to pedagogy facilitated by social
media noted include reflective and collaborative activities of learning (Htay,
McMonnies, Kalua, Ferley and Hassanein ,2020) .
Reflective activities entails student’s ability to think critically on content learnt and be
able to link to previous knowledge learnt (Htay, McMonnies, Kalua, Ferley and
Hassanein , 020) .
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4. Benefits of twitter use in the classroom
Twitter enables the students to have “a voice, to be more engaged and to interact
more freely with both their peers and instructor via knowledge sharing and Twitter
discussions”. Menkhoff, Chay, Bengtsson, Woodard & Gan, 2015)
Twitter is a rich platform to support learning related interactions and these include
sending questions to peers, sharing useful resources and engaging with fellow
students
useful to promote higher order thinking such as giving critique to other’s work and
designs, coordination, collaborative plans that include time management and group
formation.
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5. Benefits of twitter use in the classroom
Twitter can be used as an in-class assessment tool.
Prompt feedback is given which assists the facilitator/lecturer to monitor if students
comprehended the content taught in class
Prompt feedback allows the facilitator to identify knowledge gaps and address them
promptly(Chawinga ,2017)
.
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6. Practical challenges of using Twitter as a
pedagogical tool
low participation with using the tool and its purpose in academic work
some students are not comfortable with privacy of the platforms which led to
hesitations to initiate tweets and reluctance to express opinions publicly (Htay,
McMonnies, Kalua, Ferley and Hassanein ,2020).
some challenges that hinder use of social media include technical skills, inadequate
technological infrastructures, bandwidth, poor reference material (often from
unreliable sources), high volume of plagiarism as there is high level of openness of
content (Chawinga ,2017)
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7. references
 Chawinga, W. D. (2017). Taking social media to a university classroom: teaching
and learning using Twitter and blogs. International Journal of Educational
Technology in Higher Education, 14(1), 3.
 Htay, M. N. N., McMonnies, K., Kalua, T., Ferley, D., & Hassanein, M. (2020).
Postgraduate students' perspective on using Twitter as a learning resource in
higher education. Journal of Education and Health Promotion, 9.
 Menkhoff, T., Chay, Y. W., Bengtsson, M. L., Woodard, C. J., & Gan, B. (2015).
Incorporating microblogging (“tweeting”) in higher education: Lessons learnt in a
knowledge management course. Computers in Human Behavior, 51, 1295-1302.
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