Teaching with TweetDeck

Cast your mind back to high school, even college. Remember staring blindly at the teacher as they parroted on for hours? Recall the painful silences when the teacher asked for people’s opinions? Or perhaps the monotony of that one student who always had something to say?

Well times have changed. Nowadays teachers and lecturers are using technologies like Wikipedia, Twitter and much more to get students, even the shy ones, more involved in their education. This video shows how a teacher at the University of Texas is using TweetDeck and Twitter to make history classes more interactive.

Professor Monica Rankin used TweetDeck to track the classes weekly discussions by creating a search column in TweetDeck for that week’s hashtag. She then projecting TweetDeck onto a large screen in the classroom so students could watch the stream of comments. Many of the students also downloaded TweetDeck onto their own computers so they could follow the discussion on their own desktops. Professor Rankin said “those using TweetDeck commented that it was a much friendlier user-interface”. High praise indeed Professor – Thanks!

It’s great to see TweetDeck being used to educate people.  If you have an unusual story of how you use TweetDeck please let us know, we’d love to hear it.