Tweeting Through The Intermediate Plateau by Angelos Bollas

What to do with Twitter in (and out of) the classroom:

1. Communicate with your students outside the class.

Keeping in touch with the students outside the class helps them develop from group to team. We can use the class’ hashtag to tweet about everything: an interesting movie, an educational article, a note about their homework, a question that we want our students to think about before coming to class, to communicate through Twitter.

At first, it takes a lot of effort from the teacher’s part mainly because teachers need to act as moderators and follow up all students’ contributions. Gradually, though, once they see that there is an interest in what they are saying, they become more and more involved.

2. Let them keep notes while in class.

This is particularly useful in contexts where lecturing is unavoidable (e.g. English for academic progress). Let your students use the classroom hashtag in order for them to post their reactions, questions, and comments to what is going on in the class/lecture theatre. It is extremely interesting to let your students share their ideas, provided, though, that we will follow their tweets up, holding a post-lecture discussion, for example.

3. Twitter Essay Challenges.

Students, especially teenagers, enjoy participating in online challenges. For example, each of their tweets is one of the each student’s main points, they could then use the tweet as the topic sentence of a paragraph that they, then, would expand. So, from a twitter essay, they can create a whole ‘ordinary’ essay.

4. Connect with learners/classes from around the world.

What’s the best thing Twitter has done for us, teachers? We followed other teachers whom we admire and we keep on learning from each other. Why don’t we do this for our students, too? Find colleagues that use Twitter with their classes and ask your students to follow your colleagues’ students. Set up collaborative projects and let them communicate for anything that satisfies their appetite.

Purpose of the writer: The writer's purpose is to inform the teachers some fun and useful ways that can use to develop students' ability in English.

Opinion : I guess this article is pretty useful for teachers that actively use social media. The teachers can use those examples of activities in the Twitter. Moreover, students would be  interested with those activities because those are simple and they often use social media for communication, so these things will be useful.

Resource: http://eflmagazine.com/tweeting-intermediate-plateau/