Rationale

Twitter and other social media sites are becoming a part of many student’s daily lives, and being able to intermix education into the sites could potentially have many positive effects on student engagement. Many of the interviewed educators in the studies revealed that they wished they had more time in class, and Twitter was giving them the opportunity to teach more. Twitter has the ability to give students and faculty the chance to share anytime, and with a large majority of cellphones, almost anywhere. Twitter has also been shown to give students the ability to build relationships they may have never been able to make in and during a classroom setting (Junco, et al., 2010, p.8). Only spending one or two hours in a typical classroom doesn’t allow for a lot of socializing or group based work, especially in college. In the study done by Junco, Heibergert, and Loken (2010), a content analysis showed that it took “little effort on the part of the faculty member to help students create and attend a study group (p. 9).” The study also concluded that Twitter helped students be more comfortable asking each other for help (p.10). All of these different factors show why Twitter could potentially increase classroom engagement and why students could benefit from this unique teaching method.