Tweeting Answers

These days, social media plays a huge role in students distractions from schoolwork. Twitter is a free website that many of us are guilty of opening the application, scrolling through, and reading post after post of mindless information. Not all  posts are  full of mindless information. Following certain accounts can be very beneficial to our education and helping us learn more outside of the classroom.

In my Anatomy and Physiology class, our teacher had created an account just for our class and had just about all of the students  following it. The teacher's assistant, or TA, would sit in on every lecture and tweet the main points of the lesson. We did have PowerPoints and were taking notes while the professor was lecturing. However the Twitter account was a good tool to  reference if small details in our notes were missed  or if we wrote it down incorrectly.  Each class had many tweets that would fill our twitter news feed with information. This allowed the students to read through all the information again and  would not allow the students to forget that there was an account made for the class. I always went back and used the account to help study for major exams and quizzes to ensure I was getting the correct information.

Not only could you go back and review the tweets whenever you wanted to, but when it came to tests the professor would get on the account and answer questions students  had through tweets. This was better than email because once a student asked something and it was answered, the question and answer would appear on the twitter account for all to see and would not have to be answered multiple times. If this were email then the professor might be wasting  countless amount of time answering the same question and would not be very time efficient . The twitter account was also used to send out reminders of when certain reports were due, exam dates, material on exams, etc.

Using Twitter as a learning tool is a very clever move. It acts  as a constant reminder for students to pay attention to the facts and information in class instead of the latest gossip and pointless information that is covered on Twitter. It targets students  procrastinate,  and allows them to learn instead. Twitter is free to sign up, free to follow accounts, and therefore it is a very cost effective  tool to uses in the classroom. If more classrooms used Twitter then it would  become more informative  and less gossip.

I enjoyed using  Twitter in my education, because it helped me as I am  too shy to speak up and ask certain questions and it just leaves my feed with meaningful information. I can always gain more knowledge  when I see that  posts come through. People who are not paying attention to the professor during class cannot use Twitter to distract them because the class account posts  live during each class. The best part about Twitter is that it is easy to use and free. It is a great tool especially for those on a budget.