Student engagement with Twitter Take 2

In earlier posts I have detailed how I have made use of Twitter in classes by asking students to tweet responses to questions that I have posed them in and out of class (mostly in class), or of posing questions that occur to them during the more didactic episodes in the lesson. I was in a planning meeting with friend and colleague Pauline Henderson (@paulinehendog) and we were discussing some research question on the impact of Twitter in classes.

In order to do this I had to explain more fully to Pauline how I use Twitter. One of my uses was inspired by an example related to me in a Masterclass run by Alan November last year. He related the example of a Maths teacher who tweeted to her students examples of Maths in real life. As time went by they began to tweet back to her and the rest of the class examples that they had seen too.

Engagement? I think so.

This inspired me to start to tweet articles of interest in my own subject area of Economics. Often I would hold a brief class discussion on the articles, working hard to 'decode' the economists' language to make the material more accessible to my students.

The interesting behaviour (and the one I had hoped for, even mentioned to the students themselves) is that they began to tweet interesting articles that they had found. Out of 30 boys in my classes, four boys have taken the trouble to tweet articles to me and the rest of the class, in all cases more than once. I know that that's not too many, but it's four more than none.

The articles have all been relevant to the content of the time. 

Our arguments (that is, Pauline and I): 

1. To bother to do this is a sign of engagement.
2. To be able to do this those boys must have engaged in some pretty serious thinking. The focus of our course is on deep thinking, and on that score this was pretty deep.

In each case I made sure I took the time and trouble to then discuss the relevant articles with the whole class. I felt that this was important in order to legitimise their posting behaviour. The articles themselves were also genuinely interesting and relevant, and in most cases they were articles that I hadn't found myself.

We talked these articles through together, the posters often taking the lead in the discussions. We were all learners together.