Learning to Tweet: Using Twitter in the Classroom

Abstract

This presentation will focus on a Twitter assignment in two social work courses. Increasingly, agencies and organizations are using social media as a way to promote their causes, raise awareness, and educate (Guo & Saxton, 2014). As future social workers, students may be asked to engage in social media as part of their jobs, or may wish to engage on their own promoting social justice or raising awareness of a certain cause (Guo & Saxton, 2015; Hitchcock & Young, 2016). Thus, the purpose of the assignment was to help students practice using social media in a professional manner. A sub-goal of the assignment was to increase students' engagement with course content by having them tweet stories, links, and resources that were related to class material. In the presentation, I will share my assignment guidelines, discuss how I introduced the assignment (and, in some cases, Twitter) to students, and talk about how I plan to adapt the assignment in the future based on this experience. I will also solicit feedback and discussion on how this assignment could be adapted for use in other courses. Guo, C. & Saxton, G. D. (2014). Tweeting social change: How social media are changing nonprofit advocacy. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 43, 57–79. Hitchcock, L. I. & Young, J. A. (2016). Tweet, tweet!: Using live Twitter chats in social work education. Social Work Education, 35(4), 457-468.