High School Sophomores Weigh in on Using Twitter in the Classroom

Here are the views of a handful of my high school sophomores in Latin II talking about the use of Twitter in class. Leave it to kids to give you perspective.

Overall, I think Twitter is a great way to connect to each other in the classroom.... Twitter and other technology makes me feel more connected to the rest of classroom than I do in old-school classrooms. It makes the class more of a collaborative process than an individual one.

As a social networking site... not really my thing. But as an education tool, i think Twitter is a very helpful and useful site for the things we do in class, like lifelines on tests and class discussions. Overall I think that is a good tool for the classroom and we should keep using it.

I like using twitter on tests. It's helpful when you're stuck on a word or a phrase. I feel like I understand the translation better after someone helps me with it.

I personally like Twitter a lot. I think it's helpful on tests with communicating to each other about words we don't get. I like also using it outside school also for talking to friends and others, but in the classroom I find it extremely useful. I have heard of other teachers have started using this in class and I think it's great that they have used this innovative way of communicating in the classroom. I think next year we will also start to see more and more of teachers using this.

Twitter has some very good uses in the classroom. It allows us to constantly connect to each other like a giant classroom, but without the loud and constant noise [Ed -- The teacher next door might disagree re: the volume level of our noise!]. It also allows instant access to be able to help each other as well. The only problem is that it has a mind of its own. If it was a human being it would be bi-polar.

Twitter is sometimes really hard to follow. Everyone is constantly updating, and it gets a little chaotic. When you refresh the page, there are so many new posts and it gets really confusing.

I have to say that I like it. I was skeptical of it at first, but I think it could really help all of us in class. When it works, it is an easy way to connect with the other people in class. During our test last week, there were several times when I got stuck on part of my translation, and someone on twitter helped me out. I really like the idea of using Twitter as a lifeline, and I hope we will be able to use it on the final exam. I think it is cool that we are using Twitter, which is on the edge of the latest technology, for translating and understanding Latin, the language of the ancient world. This relationship shows that we can look to the future while still keeping in touch with the past, which is becoming increasingly difficult to do in today's modernized society.