Chapter 11: Repurposing Social Networking Tools For The Classroom

As Mishra and Koehler (2009) proclaim, we live in the age of cool tech tools—Facebook, Flickr, Pulse Pens, iPhones, SmartBoards, and more. Twitter, one of the more prominent new tech tools, is a microblogging service that allows users to post 140-character updates, or tweets, to their followers. A twitterer’s followers—those who have signed up to receive such updates from that user—then receive these posts in real-time on their Twitter home page, almost like a news feed. Since its public launch in the fall of 2006, the number of visitors to Twitter has grown exponentially. In July 2010, Twitter COO Dick Costolo put the number at 190 million visitors per month and 65 million tweets per day (Schonfeld, 2010), while the September, 2010 statistics on the Twitter site ( A few facts about Twitter ) estimated 175 million registered users and 95 million tweets per day.