It's Twitter's turn now!

                    

Here is the Article 1 and Article 2 I read about for this week’s topic.

This week, we learned about Twitter, a social media that through which people can interact with each other and express views about specific interests. Some studies have showed that Twitter is a convenient tool for learning and has educational value, which means it has the potential to facilitate learners’ collaborative learning and experiential learning, and also, more researches have suggested that Twitter could enhance learners’ learning motivation.

In the Article 1, it says that Twitter allows real-time communication and engagement though tweets and what people following, I think it’s a good way to utilize it for small groups of language learners. For instance, I could encourage my students to interact on Twitter to collect more information and knowledge about Chinese learning through following each other’s “Like” or the people they followed for a while.

          

                                           

In addition, I found that Twitter Chats is very useful for networking and attending them allow people to learn new perspectives from people all over the world. Like I just attended a Twitter chat called French as a Second Language chat, people exchange ideas about oral communication, fluency, vocabulary and teaching strategy in classroom, etc., people in this chat give their answers about each micro topic and also ask questions, and I really like one of them who gave some suggestions about teaching pronunciation which is also my interest, so I followed him right away so I could learn more from him and maybe ask questions in some cases. Thus, as to my Chinese teaching plan, I could do things similar like these, ask my students to join Twitter chat about Chinese teaching/learning to know more people and maybe make some friends there who can help them to improve their Chinese learning skills.

The irresistible charisma of Twitter could be a medium for language learners to discuss anything about language learning, and here I’d like to mention that Twitter is new to Asians, many Chinese who are interested in teaching Chinese online have more opportunities to reach out to learner all over the world, so now it’s our turn, and it’s also Twitter’s turn.