Teaching EFL Using Twitter

Twitter, according to Wikipedia is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read short 140-character text message, called “tweet”. It is kind of online social media that connect us with people around the world easier than Facebook. 

How can it be? If in Facebook we have to add and wait for the confirmation from person that we add, but in Twitter we just have to follow people that we want, and without waiting for confirmation we automatically can see what happens with the people from their tweets. Usually, most of us use it for following such actors and actreess. 

I am sure that teenagers nowadays have twitter account for entertaining.

For teacher, you can use it to teach English. Yeah, you can use that popular social networking among your students for teaching English.

Here what you can do with twitter for teaching:

• You can do online discussion through twitter, just decide the day and the time, for example you do it once a week on Monday at 8 p.m. In your online discussion, ask students some questions related to the materials and ask them to respond it. Or maybe they have questions about the materials that they have not understood yet. Use certain hash tag to make your students easier recognize the online discussion.
• You can use twitter for giving information or announcement about your class, such as assignments, due date for submitting assignments, or maybe when the class off.
• Using twitter, you can ask your students to make summarize or main point about the lesson of the day, or articles, or others.

These are some ideas about teaching EFL using twitter. My suggestion for teachers, let’s use our creativity to make our teaching learning process more interesting for our students. Because there still many ideas that we can do with technology to teach English. ^^