Twitter Tips for Teachers – Using Trends

Twitter Trends

A powerful function of Twitter is its immediacy. Twitter provides immediate access to a wealth of information. Updates from friends, news, educational topics, and even professional development are but a few of items that are constantly streaming through the Twitter timeline. Today I’d like to focus on news and explain how taking advantage of trending topics can provide great benefits for teachers.

Since there is so much information being exchanged on Twitter, looking at Twitter trends is often a powerful research tool. Even if the trending topics don’t contain much information a simple keyword search can provide a wealth of information. We’ll take a look at how a teacher can apply this information and then explain the some of the research methods available.

Teachers are constantly looking for new topics or additional information about a subject they are teaching. By using Twitter, a teacher can find additional topics for classes they are currently teaching, as well as a class that is being designed for next semester. If a teacher has the opportunity to consistently teach the same course year-after-year, reflecting upon the success of the methods used and value of the information provided becomes increasingly important. It is very interesting how a Twitter search will uncover additional topics that may never have been considered, as well as links to valuable resources.

Twitter trends reflect current topics. Part of being a good teacher is the ability to make a classroom concept come alive to the student by connecting it to the outside world. For example, President Obama’s $4 billion education program,  Race to the Top was and still is a Twitter topic. This trend provides a wonderful opportunity for the economics teacher to look at education spending and the potential impact this program may really have. In addition, easy access is provided to many educator’s opinions regarding the plan. This provides a nice starting point for class discussions, debates, papers and many other learning opportunities.

Sometimes a lesson just needs the right information to help reinforce the concepts. Perhaps an article, video or other tool will be just what is needed. Twitter does an excellent job of providing links to resources as well as a great platform for asking questions. A quick search may reveal just the right item. Furthermore, if you followed our tips in Twitter Tips for Teachers – Who Do I Follow?, you will have variety of followers or people to ask your pressing questions. The benefit of using Twitter versus a traditional search engine is the immediacy/currency of available information.

So how do you put this into action? The easiest place to begin is by using the trends area of Twitter. Twitter lists trending topics on the right-hand side of your account page. The top ten currently trending topics are listed below a search box and your lists (another useful tool). These are followed by ten other topics that have trended earlier in recent history but are not as current. Remember that while these topics are not the hottest current topics, they may have had more tweets connected with them than the currently trending topics. This can provide great information for an initial search.

There are a number of other interesting tools to analyze Twitter trends. Tweetstats (http://tweetstats.com) provides an interesting combination of graphs and a cloud (trending terms listed in varying size according to the related number of tweets) of trending topics. Other interesting tools include: Collecta (http://collecta.com), Trendistic (http://trendistic.com), and Twitterfall (http://twitterfall.com). Take a look at some of these applications and see if you prefer their unique options.

Locating trends, while helpful, provides a very limited access to the immense trove of information available on Twitter. To dig deeper you will need to search the Twitter timeline for keywords. Twitter, as many of the trend tools listed above, provides search functions to enable the location of tweets containing specific keywords. Locating the posts containing your specific keywords is very straightforward. Staying on top of future tweets containing these keywords is more challenging. There are several tools to alert you when new tweets are posted to the Twitter timeline containing specific keywords. Some of these tools will even email a daily digest of your specific keywords so that you can view them all at once, at your leisure. Tweetbeep (http://tweetbeep.com) is a simple to use interface that will send hourly updates via email. A couple of other services of note are Tweetscan (http://tweetscan.com) and Tweetalarm (http://www.tweetalarm.com). Using one of these services will help you save time while easily staying in touch with keywords of interest.

By putting these tips into practice, a teacher can leverage some of the incredible power offered by Twitter. They take very little time and will provide tremendous benefits to you as well as your students.

As always we look forward to you sharing your comments and experiences. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter (@darylljohnson or @sroner). Don’t wait! Go put these tips into practice and let us know the results.