Using Twitter in the Classroom

I see a lot of tweets in #edchat and #edtech about using twitter in the classroom and specific ways to use twitter, but how does this actually look like in a classroom? What programs are used to show these tweets? What do you specifically do with twitter that makes it a unique tool in the classroom?

I wanted to find the answers to these questions because I feel that twitter can be very useful in a class where students are very likely to have a cell phone (a regular cell phone can still support text-message based tweets to their twitter account).

I encourage you to watch the following video about twitter in a large classroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8


Right now I will explore the following question:

What programs are used to show these tweets?
Tweetchat.com looks like a promising place to view chats in close to real time for displaying chats or participating in them at home (away from the classroom).

EduTweet is also pretty cool, it looks like it would serve like a clicker system in a classroom, the students post a tweet with a hashtag specific to the question (e.g. #math231q1) and the teacher can search this tag and EduTweet will generate a chart with all of the different answers provided by the students. I think this would be good in a math classroom for numerical answers, or even for a multiple choice prompt.

TweetDeck is used in the above video as the facilitator of the twitter discussion. I think this is nice because you can set up columns and show multiple discussions at once so the students can view these all at the same time whereas I think the others are limited in this sense. You could ask the class a question about one thing and then a second thing without removing the first question's feed so students can refer back to it if they want.


Do you have any other ideas of programs that can be used to facilitate the use of twitter in the classroom?