ou can teach totally online courses or supplement face-to-face lessons in a traditional classroom setting. It is technology designed to help teachers reach across the digital divide to enhance teaching and learning in any classroom.

“Our students enjoy random access because they’re comfortable with hyper texting. That means they can jump from page to page and subject to subject quickly and easily.  Our students use parallel processing. Meaning that they mentally process and do many things at once and they’re able to make learning connections between those things.”

Technologies likeMoodle, an Open Source course management system ( CMS), allow even non-technical teachers to set up and maintain a Web site where students can log in, access course information, interact, share, and teach others. 

A basic Moodle Web site costs about $100 through to host, though prices are falling as these services gain popularity.

To try building your site from scratch: Open a Web browser. Visit demo.opensourcecms.com/moodle . Click "Login" at the top. Enter "admin" for the username and "demo" as the password.   Click "Users," and then, "Add a new user." Fill in the form and click "Save." Add a new user who will be your first mock student. Click "Demo" on the top left-hand side of the page. From the left-hand menu, click "Courses." Add a new category, such as "sports." Click the "Add a new course" button and add a course called "soccer101." Fill in the course information, save changes, and click "continue." Add your username and admin user as "teachers." Click your course name at the top left to go to the home page for that course. Click the button at the top right that says "Turn editing on." Now add content, such as a quiz, Web page, link, forum, or chat. Click "Demo" in the top-left corner to go back to your classroom home page. Click "Users" in the left navigation pane and add a new user called "studentL". Close your browser, log in as a student, and try taking the quiz or using other content as a student.

2. Learning to be concise.

In fact, nearly 80 percent of faculty members are using social media in some way, according to a recent survey of nearly 2,000 college faculty by the Babson Survey Research Group published in April.

Jim Newman, a Ph.D. student and instructor at Northern Illinois University, says that he uses Twitter not as a news source for his class but as a bulletin board. "[Twitter] is not something I'm going to be using to chat [with students]," Newman says. "I use it as an additional way to let students know if there's some last-minute news, like class being cancelled."

Additionally, the ubiquity of laptops and smartphones have made the integration of Twitter a virtually bureaucracy-free endeavor.

The dynamic of an intellectual ecosystem, where students dive deep into class readings and argue contentious issues outside of class, is difficult to create if discussion ends when class is over. Fortunately, Twitter has no time limit. In fact, Dr. Rankin’s colleague David Parry, Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas, found that Twitter chatter during class spilled over into the students’ free time.

Fortunately, educators (including myself) have found that Twitter is an effective way to broaden participation in lecture