15 reasons to TEFL on Twitter

or Twitter on TEFL, or Twaddle on TEFLON, or whatever it should be…

1. You were still teaching SMS language/ textese even though it had actually virtually died out in the UK due to predictive texting, and you now have a reason to carry on just as before and use those “classic” lessons over and over again

2. You have a desperate desire to continue teachers’ room banter in your free time

3. Your email spam filter is working too well and you miss have a full inbox

4. You are afraid your blog posts will still be read weeks later and that your articles might still turn up on Google well into 2010, so you want to produce something more quickly forgotten

5. The news that the over 50s are the biggest group of Twitter users was a turn on rather than a turn off

6. You didn’t hear that news and are convinced that mentioning Twitter to your teenage students will make you hip

7. Your wife or husband speaks Pre-Int level English at best, so Twitter is your only hope of communicating with someone who will understand in less than 140 words, let alone 140 characters

8. No one at school will talk to you anymore because they know you’ll just drone on about teaching technology, so you need something to do as you sit at your teachers’ room computer while everyone else talks about the weekend’s big match

9. You can’t find a single other person to invite to be your Facebook friend or LinkedIn contact, and you enjoyed the process of collecting them so much that you want to do it all over again

10. You had just got into TBL when everyone else was moving onto CLIL or learnt about hardcore CLT just as the researchers decided Focus on Form was a good thing, and you’re scared of missing yet another TEFL trend

11. Due to modern life turning us all into teenagers, you’ve gone from thinking TEFL blog posts are too short and glib to thinking that they are too long and detailed, and you want something more succinct that doesn’t make you think so much

12. You’ve always thought that 140 characters was the right length for a TEFL workshop, lesson plan or article

13. You like receiving SMS messages from people you don’t know

14. The guilt of not finding time to read loads of good stuff on your RSS feeder is too impersonal for you and you want the personal touch of people actually taking offense

15. The irony of everybody trying to be different by doing the same thing never struck you once when you were a teenager

16. You’d never read an article unless the person who wrote it wanted to know about how your last lesson went

There are no doubt some misconceptions about Twitter above (as well as a miscount), but the great thing about not being a Twit is that now that no one emails or comments on blogs anymore I never have the know the error of my ways. Phew! Always wanted to be one of those villagers who never quite realized that the fall of the Roman Empire had happened, or one of those Japanese soldiers who were still holding out on Pacific island in 1974 refusing to believe that the Emperor had surrendered…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Technology, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.