Tanya Avrith's List: twitter tips

• But what should they tweet?
• The answer is, blessedly, No, you don't.
• How do you assess what students do on Twitter? The answer is, honestly,  something I'm still working on. Or, to put the burden back on you: how you  assess what your students do on Twitter depends on what you want them to do, how  much you value it, and how much you want them to value it (or at least value  what you value).
• The answer is, blessedly, No, you don't
• what should they tweet?
• But what should they tweet
• But what should they tweet?
• what should they tweet?
• what should they tweet?
• what should they tweet
• what should they tweet?
• what should they tweet?
• what should they tweet
• But what should they tweet?
• what

• Substance
• Do I have to follow all of my students in order to teach with Twitter?  The answer is, blessedly, No, you don't.
• No, you don't
• blessedly
• lists and hashtags in his primer; these are two methods of participating in a  Twitter conversation without actually following the other participants
• tweet
• Creating a list requires you to manually add each student to the list (think of  it as a Twitter Roster), whereas hashtags rely upon students themselves to tag  their tweets

• Social media isn't social unless people know about it. Your class Twitter  list or class hashtag needs to be highly visible for your  students. It’s a good idea to provide explicit instructions on accessing the  class’s Twitter activity. At the very minimum, direct your students to the list  page for your class or the Twitter search results page if you’re using hashtags.  And if you have a class blog or wiki, it’s easy enough to include a Twitter widget in a sidebar, which  will display the Twitter activity right there on that blog or wiki.
• Seesmic or Tweetdeck
• How often should I require my students to tweet?
• as often as it makes sense for your teaching goals.
• As often as you want

• What’s important is that (1) you match your frequency requirement to  your learning objectives, and (2) you make your expectations  clear from the outset. Whether you want students to post 3-4 times a  week or 3-4 times a day, you need to let them know, and then hold them to  it.
• I also allow—and even encourage—students to tweet during class, in an attempt to  create a "back channel" to our discussion

• There's a final point about frequency to think about: how often are you going  to participate in the Twitter conversation? Will you jump in as you feel like  it? Will you only respond to tweets addressed to you? Will you simply lurk the  whole time as a silent observer? You yourself may not know what role you'll  assume until the class is underway and it just feels right to begin  participating in a certain way.
• I’ve found students tend to use Twitter for class in three ways:
•  
  1. to post news and share resources relevant to the class;
   
  2. to ask questions and respond with clarifications about the readings;  and
   
  3. to write sarcastic, irreverent comments about the readings or my  teaching.

• The first two behaviors add to the community spirit of the class and help to  sustain student interest across the days and weeks of the semester. The third  behavior, when I first noticed it, was an utterly unexpected finding. (And as I've  argued elsewhere, it was a good, powerful surprise that legitimated my use  of Twitter in and outside of the classroom. I saw students take an oppositional  stance in their writing—a welcome reprieve from the majority of student writing,  which avoids taking any stance at all.)
• I strongly recommend creating a permanent Twitter archive. A  free service such as TwapperKeeper will track a  specified hashtag, collecting the tweets 24/7, and you simply return to  TwapperKeeper any time to download the archive. It's so easy to use that I've  begun creating TwapperKeeper archives for any  hashtag there's even the slightest chance I'll be interested in revisiting  later.
• Another useful archiving tool is called, appropriately enough, The  Archivist
• This graph, for example, tells me when students were most active on Twitter (the  evening before class, it turns out). The Archivist was designed by a group of  programmers at Microsoft, so it's not surprising that the desktop application is  Windows only
• I tend to evaluate my students’ use of Twitter holistically. While I follow the  hashtag and will jump into the conversation, I don’t grade every tweet. In the  past I've counted Twitter as part of the class participation grade (which  generally counts as 15-20% of the final grade). And using the graphs produced by  a program like The Archivist, it's plain to see which students are active and  which have fallen off the chart:
• However you decide to assess your students' Twitter activity, the key is to  make your expectations clear

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