I have never been able to "get" Twitter. I can see the value if there is a news story that is moving quickly and you want to get whatever news there is as quickly as possible. I have used Twitter this way myself but found it lacking. The majority of tweets did not seem to be of high quality. A number of bloggers I read ask to be followed on Twitter but why? I read their blog posts regularly. What will be added by getting several short tweets a day? Will they just alert me to new posts they have written or articles somewhere else that I have probably already found or don't want to read? Most of the uses I have seen of Twitter seem to be superficial and not terribly valuable.
I followed #edtech and #educationaltechnology this week and did not find the tweets useful. They were usually links to an article the tweeter had read and was passing on. The blogs I read regularly reported on many of the same articles.
I am not a teacher but I know a couple of college teachers who use Twitter to let students know if the assignment has been changed or needs clarification or if class is cancelled for the day. Those seem like legitimate uses. A couple of the ideas in Twitter articles posted for this week seemed like they might be good teaching tools, especially the ones that relate to geography. For the most part, though, it seems more like using the technology because it exists instead of because it has much to offer in a classroom.
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