Teaching With a Technological Twist: Exit Tickets via Twitter in Literacy Classrooms

Literacy practitioners, educators, and researchers have eagerly adopted social media technology, particularly what is referred to as New Literacies (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2007a), as a way to support peertopeer learning, build community, and expand opportunities for expression (Kimmons, 2014). Social media technologies have evolved to the point that they have become common ways of communicating, sharing information, and meaning making (Beach, 2012). For those of us working with students, regardless of the level being taught, using social media also lets us help our students develop attitudes and competencies that are valued in the 21stcentury classrooms where they will be working (Jenkins, 2007; Thibaut, 2015), as well as fit into the current culture of social media– connected educators (Booth, 2012; Kist, Tollafield, & Dagistan, 2014; Rodesiler, 2015). In other educational contexts, social media engages students, provides opportunities to collaborate and connect with peers, and offers opportunities for what students may see as informal learning (Kilinc, Evans, & Korkmaz, 2012). Athough we have been forthright in our struggles with integrating technology into our work with preservice teachers (HungerfordKresser, Wiggins, & AmaroJiménez, 2011, 2014), we believe that digital literacies can offer variety to strategy implementation in 21stcentury classrooms, especially with secondary and adult literacy practitioners. How to incorporate digital literacies, both as tools our students can use and as strategies we could model in our own teaching, has become a question we regularly ask one another. Taking what we have learned from previous studies—that technology should never be an addon, technology for technology’s sake— in this article, we describe, reflect, and analyze how Twitter was used as the medium to implement a strategy in four of Carla’s (first author) courses over three years. The courses focused on theories, research, and practice as they relate to working with English learners. We frame this work within a New Literacies perspective (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2007b; Knobel & Lankshear, 2014; Lankshear & Knobel, 2011; Street, 1998) because doing so helped us focus on ways that meaning making was construed through digital tools (in this case, Twitter). As a theoretical perspective, New Literacies studies (Coiro et al., 2007b; Knobel & Lankshear, 2014; Lankshear & Knobel, 2011; Street, 1998) helped us focus on the linguistic and social ways that students were making meaning as they used digital tools to participate in what had previously been a paperandpencil strategy, as we called on our students to notice the continually and rapidly changing practices that technology affords. We looked at the ways Twitter expanded the ways students produced and shared learning as part of a participatory culture (Jenkins, 2010), Teaching With a Technological Twist: Exit Tickets via Twitter in Literacy Classrooms