Before this module, I never thought twitter can be a good tool for teaching and learning. Twitter for me is just for teenagers to follow stars like Justin Bieber. It's really a surprise for me that I can find so many resources and have conversations with so many my fellow teachers and sometimes some big shots in this field.
As for professional development, twitter provides a platform for teachers to share their ideas, webpages, videos, articles, and almost everything we can see online. Also, teachers can gather together with some like-minded colleagues all around the world in a certain time and post topics and articles and other resources they like. This we could also find in google groups.
As for future teaching, a teacher can use twitter as a virtual dashboard and keep all the students involved. Also, students can learn from each other and communicate with each other. Like in the article The Teacher's Guide to Twitter, ' Using Twitter is a two part process. The first part is as a consumer, where you follow people, read their tweets, and learn from them. A lot of people stop there, which is easy to understand since that is the easy part. But the real magic happens when you share, too.' Twitter is like other technology tools that can enhance communication, both input and output.
However, in China, we don't have proper access to twitter.com, I need to find an alternative for this wonderful website and also hope the situation may change someday.
In a word, the technologies are changing the education forms, we need to keep up with the trend and enhance the communicative nature of language education by using these technology tools.
Would Sina-Weibo work for you?
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