Micro-blogging in education

I agree with Seth who says in his blog (DigitaLang) that Twitter givevs students more freedom to practice English because students can use what they have learned in class in their lives. Of course, a teacher in Japan needs to have a discussion why students are supposed to post what they are doing in English instead of Japanese, but after a teacher and students agree to do so in English, using Twitter will bring great benefits to students. One of the issues learning English in Japan is lack of opportunity to use it. But using Twitter is going to be one of the solutions for the issue. Because students are not required to write a long paragraph or complicated essays, they may feel much comfortable to use English. I believe even students in an elementary level can practice English. For example, if students learn a verb "drink," they can use it for describing what they are drinking. If they don't know an English word for what they are drinking, they will look up the word in a dictionary. As a consequence, they will learn not only how to use "drink", but also how to say objects in English. I would say Twitter will be a great place for review class. In addition, we can see a posibility for them to be autonomous learners.



Twitter for Academia told me one of the useful tools of Twitter, which is "track". With Twitter, we can track a word to see how the word is used in different situations. For language teaching and learning, authenticity is a critical factor. Learning language will be limited if it occurs only in class and if it doesn't have any connection with the real world. However, if students learn how the language is used, their learning will be more meaningful for them and it will be more effective. I would like to try to have students analyze the use of words to be learned in the future.