Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Features and Functionalities of Twitter


Twitter is a free social media tool that can be used for many different things including connecting with people, advertising, expressing oneself, sharing ideas and information, etc.  Many people have a Twitter profile for personal use but businesses, schools, and universities can also utilize it professionally.  This tool gives you the option of creating a private or public account that allows you to choose who can view your profile.  For instance, a teacher may have two accounts, one for personal or private use and another for educational or public purposes. 

There are many different features of Twitter which include:
  • Ability to search for people and "follow" them
    • When you follow a person you are able to view their activity on Twitter (tweets, retweets, followers, etc.)
  • Tweet - a test comment of 140 characters or less that posts to your page and is shared with your followers
  • Retweet (RT) - re-posting a tweet that was created by another person
  • Direct message (DM) - a private tweet between 2 people
  • @ - this symbol is used to identify another user in a tweet
    • Example: @username is the link to the profile of the user
  • # (hashtag) - this symbol is used to identify key words in a tweet and links to another page of similar topics
    • Examples: #ET630, #ilovecooking, #NFL, etc.
    • All tweets that include the same hashtag will appear together on a separate page
  • Favorite - a bookmark of tweets that you like



Twitter is very user friendly and can be understood by simply exploring the website and experimenting with the functions.  This makes it a perfect tool for teachers to use in the classroom to increase student motivation and engagement.  Stay tuned for examples of how to incorporate Twitter into your classroom in my next blog…

Links for help with Twitter:



2 comments:

  1. Twitter was not a tool I used because frankly, I didn't take the time to understand how to use it and what all the symbols meant. So I appreciate you breaking down the symbols for me (@,# etc.). This platform seems to be very widely used and therefore would probably be motivating for my students. It would be great to see them using a tool such as this one for sharing resources and information that will benefit them as learners. Thanks for sharing! :)

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  2. I'm interested to see what uses you come up with for Twitter in the classroom. It has potential, but it is difficult to use it effectively in the classroom.

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