COLLEGE STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARD USING TWITTER IN THE CLASSROOM
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THE STUDY
CONCLUSIONS
RECOMMENDATIONS
Presented at Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education 2013, March 28, 2013
by Dr. Bulent Dogan
bdogan@northamerican.edu
North American University
Houston, TX
FEATURES
STATISTICS
GROWTH
OVERVIEW
- Tweets: Brief posts or messages
- Tweets has a character limit: 140
- Some of the uses include:
- Reading Updates of other users
- Follow trends
- Retweet: Resending messages
- Use hashtags to categorize messages
- Creating public or private Lists consisting of tweets
- Tremendous growth since the first message sent in 2006 (Twitter.com, 2011).
- 500 million registered users
- 140 million in US (Semiocast, 2012).
- Twitter users generate over 400 million messages per day
- Most messages sent from a mobile device
- Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging platform
- Two aspects:
- Blogging
- Social Networking
- Ranked behind Facebook in popularity and user number
- Twitter usage has been on rise
- Twitter users:
- 15% of all internet users between the ages of 18 and 65
- Within this group, 31% of the users are between 18 and 24
- College students are interested in Social Media
- 20% of college students use Twitter on a daily basis
- 90% of college students using Facebook
- College Faculty is behind using Social Media
- 3% use Twitter as a learning tool
- 8% use Facebook as part of curriculum
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TWITTER USE IN CLASSROOM
- Current purposes of using Twitter in the college classroom (Dunlap McWilliams, Hickey, Hines, Conner, Badge, Johnson, Moseley and Cann, 2011; Junco 2012; Luo & Gao, 2012).
- a platform for quick communication;
- student-student and student-teacher interaction;
- collaborative, reflective, critical, and informal learning;
- formation of learning community and student networks;
- peer-to-peer support
- Benefits of adopting Twitter (Junco, Heiberger Luo & Gao, 2012).
- Increases in
- student interaction,
- in-class participation,
- engagement levels,
- Improvements in overall GPA
- Limitations and Challenges include (Grosseck Luo & Gao, 2012)
- information overload for students;
- text character limitation when tweeting;
- unstructured learning activities;
- distracting and addicting
THE STUDY
- Investigated attitudes of undergraduate students
- 3 sections of Computer Literacy (entry level course) Fall 2011
- 1 section of Integrating Technology into Education, (sophomore level course) Spring 2012
- Taught by same instructor
- Identical instructional methods and Learning activities used:
- Creative Groupwork (Cooperative Learning)
- Quizzing and Polling
- In and after class discussions
- PARTICIPANTS:
- 90 students enrolled
- 89 students completed an online survey (n=89)
- 99% response rate
- Males (n=41), Females (n=48)
- Ages ranged between 18 and 27
- 73% between the ages of 18 and 20.
GENERAL PROCEDURES
PROCEDURES FOR
GROUPWORK ACTIVITY
PROCEDURES FOR
POLLING AND QUIZZING ACTIVITY
- Majority of the students did not have prior experience with Twitter
- Training provided the first week of each semester
- Training topics included:
- how to create an account on Twitter;
- how to follow the class Twitter account;
- how to use “hashtags” for class assignments;
- and how to create long tweets.
- After the training, students were asked to create a new account
- With first and last names used for account
- separate accounts rather than personal required for students
- Students were asked to follow the class Twitter account,
- This account was moderated by the instructor
- Public student list was formed under the class Twitter account
- The list allowed students to see each other’s tweets without “following” each other
- This procedure was chosen to prevent confusion and distraction among the students
- The instructor regularly tweeted (at least once a week)
- Assignments
- Discussion questions
- Announcements
PROCEDURES FOR
DISCUSSION ACTIVITY
- A game-like activity was used by the instructor for reviewing the week’s content
- This activity was conducted before the weekly quiz was administered.
- This was the most popular classroom activity
- Students were able to use “lifelines” in order to help them answer the questions in the “review game”.
- One of the “lifelines” was asking the class’ opinion on the question by using Twitter’s polling feature.
- A third-party application, through Polleverywhere.com, was used to solicit student opinions on a given question.
- Students were able to send a tweet using a special code assigned by this system
- The correct answer and live results were displayed on a projector screen.
- Students were divided into small groups
- Group members were rotated every week
- Each group was assigned a topic to discuss and research
- One student in the group was selected as group leader
- The group leader’s role:
- to facilitate the discussion
- to assign research questions to individual group members
- First groups hold a general discussion around the topic
- Then, each group member had to answer a question for the group
- Members were required to conduct quick research on the internet
- A group “hashtag” was assigned for this activity
- Students were able to send individual tweets for the group using this hashtag
- The group hashtag served following purposes:
- This allowed instructor to easily track individual contributions of each group member
- By sending students were able to read other groups’ tweets and learn from them as well.
- Individual tweets for the group were graded
- The group members were encouraged to read and reply to other groups’ tweets
- Twitter was used actively for discussions, especially after class.
- These virtual discussions were initiated by questions posed by the instructor.
- Each week a new topic was assigned using the class Twitter account.
- Students were required to send a tweet in response to the weekly discussion question.
- Students were encouraged to read each other’s tweets and reply.
Results
“What features did you dislike the most about Twitter?”
Results
“What feature did you like the most about Twitter?”
Results
“Students’ experiences with learning activities through Twitter”
five-point Likert-scale ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree
Results
RESULTS
Table 1. Value and benefit of using Twitter in classroom as reported by students, (n=89)
Results
“Students’ experiences with learning activities through Twitter”
five-point Likert-scale ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree
Table 2. Students’ attitudes toward Group Work activity using Twitter, (n=89)
Results
“Students’ experiences with learning activities through Twitter”
five-point Likert-scale ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree
Results
“Students’ experiences with learning activities through Twitter”
five-point Likert-scale ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree
Table 3. Students’ attitudes toward discussionactivity using Twitter, (n=89)
Results
“Students’ experiences with learning activities through Twitter”
five-point Likert-scale ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree
Table 5. Students’ attitudes toward using Twitter for class activities, (n=89)
Table 4. Students’ attitudes toward polling and voting activity using Twitter, (n=89)
CONCLUSIONS
- According to the results, the majority of the students (65%) in this research study did not have a Twitter account before the study
- almost 90% of the students, however, did have an existing Facebook account prior to the study.
- Even among the small number of students who had a Twitter account, only 24% of them used their account “Always” and when combined with the other categories, almost 50% of the students used their Twitter accounts to some degree of frequency.
- The results indicated that students in this study did not have much experience with Twitter prior to taking the courses
- Additionally, the number of students using Twitter and Facebook in this study is similar to other studies aligned with national statistics (Martin, 2009; Smith Junco, 2011).
CONCLUSIONS
- Being able to send and receive “Quick updates” was the most desired feature of Twitter, along with “Less clutter and simple interface,” when compared to other social media tools.
- “Text limitation” was by far the most disliked feature of Twitter, restricting students’ ability to explain their ideas.
- A great majority of the students found that Twitter was more appropriate and focused for classroom activities compared to other social media sites.
- In addition, the results revealed that students would like to continue using Twitter in a variety of ways, including required class work, quick communication with friends, educational purposes, and following trends.
- Students in this study generally agreed that Twitter was a valuable tool, especially when sharing research results with the class.
- Students also valued the ability to quickly communicate with the instructor and the other students.
- To a lesser extent, students felt that connecting with the class after class time was an additional benefit to those mentioned above.
conclusions
- Among the class activities which utilized Twitter in this experiment, “Polling and Quizzing” received the most attention and positive feedback from students.
- Polling students, with live projected responses, was the students’ favorite activity when reviewing the course content for the week.
- Students indicated that due to this activity they participated more in classroom discussions and felt more comfortable answering questions compared to the traditional “show of hands” method.
- Overall, the results conform to similar studies showing increased student participation as well as engagement, as a result of Twitter use in the classroom (Junco, Heiberger Luo & Gao, 2012).
CONCLUSIONS
conclusions
- In addition, the creative group work activity was very well received by the students.
- Students particularly noted that the instructor was able to keep track of group members’ individual contributions to the group work activity.
- According to the results, the discussion activity allowed students to be creative, as students were able to post research findings through URLs, pictures, and videos
- Not completely unexpected, as research shows that most tweets are sent from mobile devices, students found that using Twitter for the discussion activity on mobile devices, such as a smartphone or iPad, was easier than using it on traditional online forums on computers (Gaskell, 2012).
CONCLUSIONS
conclusions
- Overall, students agreed in uniformity that using Twitter for certain class activities (group work, polling, and discussions) in this study resulted in increased engagement as well as an enhanced understanding and comprehension of class material.
- In conclusion, further investigation is needed to fully understand if some of the positive initial findings from this study can be replicated in different settings with larger populations in order to be generalized.
- Future studies investigating the following is recommended:
- if and how Twitter can be incorporated into other classroom activities;
- in what conditions and in what kind of structured activity the use of Twitter would produce the utmost positive learning environment;
- and possible challenges with using Twitter for these activities
- The 140 character limitation for tweets can be overridden by using third-party applications such as twitlonger.com or xltweet.com. Students in this study were able to express their ideas and answer discussion questions using some of these services.
- Training sessions, outlining the basic features of Twitter, are essential for effective implementation of Twitter in the classroom, as it is a relatively new social media tool.
- Assigning “hashtags” for each assignment and using these “hashtags” should be encouraged for better categorization and organization of messages. Students can be instructed to reply to other students to increase interaction.
- Following organizations or and individuals who are engaged in matters relating to material studied in class through Twitter would be another worthwhile class activity for college students.
- Third-party applications can be explored to make Twitter work more efficiently with additional capabilities.
THANK YOU!
- Email: bdogan@northamerican.edu
- For more information
- A copy of this power point presentation
- Research ideas and projects
- URLs:
- Prezi Presentation: http://prezi.com/user/bdogan/
- www.northamerican.edu/~bdogan
- www.distco.org
- www.edtechpeople.com