Twitter as a microblogging tool has
been widely recognized for its potentials to transform learning. Language
learning through social network services like Twitter and Facebook is
considered to be authentic, interactive and motivative. Twitter, obviously,
connects the language learners worldwide to their learning resources, their ‘teachers
outside the classroom’, throughout the world by tweets with hashtags and links.
It provides a favorable environment to increase language learners’ authentic
input and output, and to enable them actively negotiate meaning and participate
in the community of learning. With great interest in the learning potentials of
Twitter, I, as a L2 speaker and future educator, did some review on how
teachers have integrate Twitter into their classroom and how students perceive
their language learning through social network in Twitter. My goal of reading these
research articles is to gain some thoughts in what the most important starting
point to stand on when integrate social media like Twitter into classroom to
make learning effective and efficient.
The first
thought is that when bring Twitter into lesson design or incorporate Twitter
into classroom teaching, I would start with clear instructions to the students.
In the article Twitter as a LearningCommunity in Higher Education, the initial phase of student working with
Twitter showed by low number of tweets, lack of interaction, limited resources and
comparatively great technical difficulties.
Connecting what was found in the study
to my own experience in our LAI 590 course (where Dr. Lucia gives very specific
and detailed instructions), clear instructions from the teacher, with explanations,
images, and even expected problems students may encounter, are undoubtedly
crucial for students’ successful engaging in the learning activities in the
social network. Walking through some technical procedures or completing some
modeling tasks hand in hand with students, especially at the initial phase of
using tools like Twitter, will also benefit students’ successful and efficient
later exploration of the tool and online resources. Some people may argue that too specific or too
much detailed instructions will be more than likely to compromise learners’
creativity. However, I believe that clear instructions would deliver solid
learning objectives to the students, so the students would know the expected
learning outcomes before they set out digging into the online resources or
coming up with their own plans and strategies for learning. Rather than compromising
students’ creativity, clear instructions would guide the students to focus their
innovation on the learning goals, which ensures the learning process to be
meaningful yet engaging to the students.
Another thought I would
always keep in mind is how to assess students actual learning from social
network services. Despite the strong relationship between Twitter usage and
students’ engagement, found in Twitter for teaching: Can social media be used to enhance the process of learning?,
students’ actual learning through the tool is hard to track and thus stays
mostly unknown. To some extent, the nature of social network learning probably
would make it more difficult to assess students online learning outcomes. Without
the knowledge of what the students have learned or have not yet accomplished in
learning, instructional decisions we make in the future may not be tailored to
the students’ needs, either the feedback we provide to them. However, assessing
students actual learning does not have to be always question-and-answer,
multiple choices or true-or-false statements. An activity designed with
specific language learning objectives would be a good indication of the
students’ utilization of the resource they can get their hands on and the
application of their language skills. An in-class discussion with a tweet
prompt would probably well inform students’ individual learning stage if I could
keep a phrasal summary file for each student on his or her performance and
participation during the discussion. A journal entry from students or a mind
map they have during working with Twitter and other online resources would also
speak a lot about their gains and pains. Utilizing multiple resources, as well
as available online tools, to acquire what the students have or have not
successfully accomplished, to assess how comfortable the students are when use
the language they learn, and to what knowledge and skills that have gained from
the social networking learning are or can be incorporated into classroom
learning by the students themselves would make my teaching meaningful and
effective and thus the students’ learning productive and fruitful.
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