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Some adventurous professors have used Twitter as a teaching tool for at least a few years. At a presentation at Educause in 2009, W. Gardner Campbell, director of the academy of teaching and learning at Baylor University, extolled the virtues of allowing students to pose questions to the professor and each other — an important part of the thinking and learning process — without having to raise their hands to do so immediately and aloud. And in November, a group of professors published a scientific paper suggesting that bringing Twitter into the learning process might boost student engagement and performance.

But while Lomicka and her tech-forward peers are not advocating that every college go the way of Chapel Hill, they are finding out that some relatively novel teaching technologies that are used by academics of all stripes, such as Twitter and iTunes U, are particularly useful for teaching languages.

At Emory University, language instructional content is far and away the biggest export of its public repository on iTunes U, where visitors from around the world have downloaded more than 10 million files since Emory opened the site in 2007.

Medium does matter

The students do not learn "better" because my life as a teacher is "easier." Convenience is not a form of effective pedagogy. My students learn better when they take the active role in finding and choosing texts, asking their own questions, and creating their own projects. In my 9th grade West Civ class, this means students learn directly from primary sources (see the Internet History Sourcebook, the Perseus Project, the Library of Congress's 'Teaching with Primary Sources' project, and the Internet Archive) without the filter of a textbook middleman. It means that they keep daily blogs full of questions and reflections on our learning and that they engage with our crowdsourced Q&A wiki.