Twitter – MicroBlogging.
I’ve just recently discovered “Twitter” http://twitter.com thanks to online colleagues such as Graham Stanley , great blogs like Common Craft and (strangely enough) the BBC Radio 4 program “iPM” which recently discussed Twittering.
Twitter has been described as “Micro Blogging” or in other words: like a blog, but much smaller. When I write a Twitter post (a Tweet!) I can only use a maximum of 140 characters. These get sent to my Twitter homepage. Any of my friends or colleagues who want to have short, personal updates on “What I’m up to at the moment” can check by my homepage to read about what I’m doing and get a quick update on my life. They can also follow me automatically via RSS if they want to. This video by Common Craft explains the beauty of Twittering nicely:
One of the things I like about Twitter is the tiny size of posts you can make to it, 140 characters disappears really quickly. This means that language students don’t need to feel pressured into writing huge, long blog posts (which I have found can be off-putting for students who are writing a “normal” blog.) With Twitter the emphasis is on posting short, but sweet posts and often.
Another thing I really like about Twitter is that you can send your Twitter posts from a mobile phone (Moblogging?) This could also give our students more freedom to practice their English when it’s most convenient to them. Out in the centre of town? Seen something amazing? Let your classmates and friends know all about it! Practice your English while your doing so!
I’d also like to see if it’s possible to centrally “aggregate” several Twitter feeds. I was thinking of trying to set up a wiki which I’d use to tie all the Tweets from a class together in one place. It would also make for some really interesting inter-personal reading. Ever wondered what your class mates are doing on a Sunday evening? Check Twitter and see if they are telling you! If you look to the right of this post you’ll see my own Twitter feeds.
I’m sure I’ll be using this tool in my next A2 (Elementary Level) classes. I think Twitter will be a great way for my students to practice using the Present Continuous. I also want to try it out with a higher level class I am working with, we are blogging together, but not all the students are able to find the time to post regularly. Maybe they will with Twitter?
In the mean time, does anyone know about any “Twitter Aggregators” out there?I’d love to try out the idea of collecting my students’ posts together all in one, central place.
All the best and have fun!
Seth 
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Seth,
Ana Maria Menezes, a Brazilian friend, has been doing some great stuff using Twitter for beginners. She’s anamariacult in Twitter.
Also, I’ve been using Diigo as my online bookmarking. Just switched from delicious, but when you update in Diigo it also updates my delicious account. And the great thing about Diigo is that you can “twitter” your favorite online bookmarks very easily just by clicking “twitter this”. I’m in love with Diigo! If you decide to join us, there are many of us in the group “educators” created by Vicky Davis.
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There is a service called TwitterFeed that will parse rss feeds and send them to a twitter account so that the posts from a blog will be sent to you as tweets.
I have just spent a few hours trying to see if it will parse rss from a twitter account which it seems not to want to do.
As I came back here to post the result i realised that you could probably do what you want using FriendFeed. You would probably have to set up a new account for the perpose and add all your students to it.
Pretty sere you could then send a feed from FriendFeed to a Twitter account if that’s what you wanted.
I realise this post is from a while back and things move on fast but hope it was of some help.
All the best Dave
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