HootCourse - A Classroom Application for Twitter

Although my mother twitters, I sadly do not. I have become part of the Facebook junkie crowd and religiously check at least twice a day.  We know the students are using Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, and Xanga to communicate to this nifty little tool has created a way for students to communicate and collaborate using the resources in which they are familar with educational adaptations.

Here's the gist:

"At its most basic HootCourse is a platform on which you can create a conversation channel which HootCourse calls "courses". Your students can post comments and questions in the course you create. If your students have Twitter or Facebook accounts they can login using those accounts to post messages. Students can also post messages in Twitter, use the hashtag you assign to your course, and then HootCourse will pull all of their Tweets into your course. If students need to write more than 140 characters they have their posts on Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, or Xanga appear in your HootCourse course."

Update: apparently if you login into HootCourse using your Twitter account and make your course public, all of your messages appear in HootCourse as well as on Twitter.



Applications for Education

HootCourse categorizes students' messages into comments, questions, and links. Anytime a student uses a question mark in a message, that message will appear in a column just for questions. If you're using HootCourse as a backchannel during a presentation the questions column will make it easy to find the questions your audience is asking.

By providing your course with a category for messages containing links, HootCourse could be useful for sharing of links that are relevant to your course discussions.