A range of tools using Powerpoint and Adobe Flash including twitter feedback slides, Powerpoint auto-tweet, Powerpoint twitter voting. From Noeline Wright's speed seminar.
"A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities."
A new Twitter guide published by the LSE Public Policy Group and the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog seeks to answer this question, and show academics and researchers how to get the most out of the micro-blogging site. The Guide is designed to lead the novice through the basics of Twitter but also provide tips on how it can aid the teaching and research of the more experienced academic tweeter.
Summary: Twitter is undoubtedly one of the most recent and successful examples of social networking to appear on the World Wide Web. Twitter provides an API so Web developers can enable their users to access the various features that the Twitter site provides. In this article, learn the basics of using the Twitter REST API.
"TAGS Viewer allows users to browse, explore, and search a Twitter archive. As a backend, it requires Martin Hawksey's Twitter Archive Google Spreadsheet (TAGS). TAGS provides a free, non-technical method of archiving tweets for a given hashtag, which can be particularly useful for capturing a conference's backchannel.
This application is contained in a single HTML file and has no server dependencies, which makes it easy to host anywhere: just upload a single file (this one!) and you're done. Or, if you don't need to share it with anyone, just double-click the file on your hard drive to open it in your Web browser. Configuration is as simple as supplying a Google Spreadsheet URL"
Options for using Twitter.
"It is organized by the categories WATCH (easiest degree of difficulty, TALK (moderate), and PRODUCE (highest degree of difficulty). We did our best to put each box in the appropriate place. Therefore, some of them are in between different degrees of difficulty, etc."