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To the Internet hipsters who discovered Twitter in 2006, Oprah's inaugural tweet - FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY, she typed - was the end of the era, the shark jump. But that's like saying the Beatles were over after they appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show."\nTwittermania has only begun. In the days after Oprah's show, Twitter's traffic growth is accelerating. The ratings service HitWise now ranks twitter.com as America's No. 38 Web site. It's about to rocket past CNN and Wells Fargo.

This post describes the two main benefits professors find when using Twitter in lecture.

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom. Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.

The modern American school faces rough challenges. Budget cuts have caused ballooning class sizes, many teachers struggle with poorly motivated students, and in many schools a war is being waged on distracting technologies. In response, innovative educators are embracing social media to fight back against the onslaught of problems. Technologies such as Twitter and Skype offer ideal solutions as inexpensive tools of team-based education.

CommonCraft now has their entire collection of "Explanations in Plain English" videos posted to their own YouTube Channel. See: social networking, twitter, blogs, wikis etc.

Twitter and backchanneling sessions only capture information for finite periods of time. This site will be used to store all of the great links and resources discovered through ISTE 2011 (Jun 26-29, 2011) so you can retrieve them at home. Please join with me and share your favorite links.