Last year, I started using Twitter as an extra credit tool in my classes. I give students homework extra credit after every class for one of three options:
- A summary of class
- A question about class
- An answer to someone else’s question
The benefits of this are many:
- Students make community with each other.
- I get to see what students thought class was about and if there are questions that need answered.
- Students practice summarizing.
- When students miss class, they can check the Twitter feed to see what they missed.
Often students summarize concepts very nicely and creatively. It’s great to see students learning from each other and forming community, which usually spills out of the virtual world and into the physical.
As much as I’ve liked it over the last year, my students this semester have already raised the Twitter community to a new level. Below are several examples of tweets from my students — none of which satisfy the criteria for extra credit — which are fun and reveal a relationship with our class that I can only hope to reproduce in future semesters:
As a bonus, here’s an exchange with a student in my statistics class this Labor Day:
hal's house of pancakes 
Great idea! I’ve been thinking about giving something like this a try.