Ada's Reflections II - Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literacy Practice by Christine Greenhow & Benjamin Gleason

In the educational context, the term ‘assessment’ seems to have the uncanny ability of evoking terrors among students as one thing would often surface in their minds and that would be – grades. Will it be graded or will it not? If it is graded, extra effort will be invested by the students and if it is not, then perhaps the students will just do the minimum. This would then distort the necessity and potentially neutral position of assessments in school, especially when teachers depend on it to possibly gauge and monitor their students’ comprehension of a certain topic or issue and see what needs to be addressed in their classroom. It is perhaps in this context that teachers could think of several alternative forms of assessment which could enhance their students’ learning while at the same time, help them meet the demands of the school syllabus as well as the challenges of a testing system. 

The introduction of social media into schools today seems to create yet another engaging and creative venue for students and teachers to have a discussion that allows room for great exchange of ideas to take place but more importantly, for teacher to assess their students’ understanding and learning. This could largely be the reason behind the increasing use of social media recently, especially if we are to consider the pedagogical benefits that it brings. Twitter for one, has been increasingly popular among teachers these days as it is considered to be a good communication tool that could enhance class participation and response within a short frame of time. "Twitteracy: Tweeting as new literacy practice" reinforces that belief as it examines how Twitter helps to foster a more active learning environment that encourages students to be more engaged in the classroom. The article also mentions how using Twitter helps to “document students’ learning process and facilitate peer interaction” which would leave more room for teachers to invite students’ critical and collaborative participation in the classroom into a dynamic online community. More importantly, this article also explores how Twitter helps to foster a rich discussion of literature themes through reflection and peer questioning. All these could certainly serve as a form of assessment for teachers to see what needs to be addressed in class while presenting a venue for students to connect with their classmates.

However, while some may argue that Twitter has several shortcomings such as the extent of message that student are able to tweet, I feel that it is perhaps more important to acknowledge the positive results that it could have on students, particularly the quieter ones who could use this platform to share their ideas or opinions with the rest of their classmates. The role of teachers in this case should not be underestimated even with the presence of such interactive tools in class as they could join in the Twitter discussion and be the clarifier of students’ doubts. Hence, the teacher will still be present in the discussion to clarify and support – in this case, to potentially provide scaffold for students to move on from one understanding to another.

Personally, I am a Twitter fan ever since I learnt about it during the ICT module and have been using it for my micro-teaching in the Teaching Poetry/Prose modules. I also tried to use Twitter once for one of my history lesson during last year’s Teaching Practice. However, although the students are engaged during the lesson, I feel that there are certainly a lot of room for improvements to be made to further engage the students in class so that they would not consider the activity just a fun one and not take away anything once the lesson is over. In this respect, it is perhaps important for me to explore some possible methods available so that the students can take the discussion that they already had on Twitter to another higher platform in order to deepen their understanding about the particular topic or issue.