Be thoughtful, be wise.

It is really a brand new way to use twitter this way. To be honest, I was not very clear about how to use this kind of microblogs for language teaching. However, after have read the article How Twitter will revolutionise academic research and teaching and 28 Creative Ways Teachers Are Using Twitter, I started to realize that there were quite a lot of advantages I could get from microblogs.

Firstly, I could get the responses from the students faster. If I post a question for discussion, or something valuable I got from other resources, the students can see them immediately, and they could post their reflections at once under my question. This way of teaching will make the “outside-classroom” discussions possible. This kind of communication will allow the teacher and the students to have some more effective interactions.

Secondly, since there are so many professionals are microblog users, both the students and the teachers can have a great channel to communicate with those professionals which is impossible for us to do in other ways. We could discover so many shining points by talking with those authorities and masters in our research field. And those discoveries might me very helpful for our future teaching.

Last but not least, microblogs are good places for teachers to post important information about the class. We could use it to post our syllabus, the assignments, or even the notes for our classes. Microblogs are better than the school’s systems sometimes because they are more interesting and enjoyable, so the students tend to check them more often. In this way, they can get the important information easier and faster, and they will not miss much contents, too.

In conclusion, like Ernesto Priego said, “Social media is becoming increasingly important in teaching and research work but tutors must remember, it’s conversation not a lecture.” That means what we need to form is a better environment for the teachers and the students to better interact. The students’ responses seem to be more important at this point. Although more and more teachers start to realize that social media is a good tool for language teaching, we still need to use it carefully and wisely.