While implementing Twitter in my classroom I have been doing a lot of research about the topic. I ran across a good article today about teens and Twitter. The basic premise is that teens aren’t using Twitter yet because they are using Facebook to accomplish most of the other purposes of Twitter. When I even mentioned Twitter in class the kids didn’t get the point of it and they thought it was “creepy” to follow someone (as this post also illustrates) but it no different than reading your friends’ status updates. The article states that one of the biggest uses of Twitter is marketing (or self promotion) and most teens don’t need to do that yet.

I will go one step further and say a lot of the adult users of Twitter are people who don’t have Facebook pages and if they did they would probably use Twitter a lot less. Also, I think teens don’t use Twitter as much because cell phones are treated like a cancer in high schools. If we tried to embrace this technology rather than shun it, we might fine that we can make good things happen.

That begs the question, why do I use Twitter.

I started Continue reading →