Using Twitter While Teaching

I taught the teenage bible study last night at church. I find it difficult to teach sometimes, because the material doesn't seem to connect or I don't seem to connect. I often wonder how to incorporate technology into my classes. When we can afford it, I'd like to put a few computers in the teen room to use during class, to interactively answer questions by looking up answers online, or add to a discussion by sharing insights from an article located online.

As I taught last night, I reflected that being able to project slides of images or even text onto a screen would be helpful in providing another outlet for interaction instead of just our discussion. I also wondered how useful projecting a second screen that allowed for real-time Twitter updates would be.

Then I read this article today. Seems I've been beat to the punch!

The article is about an instructor, Cole Camplese, and how he uses Twitter in his classes at Penn State (University Park). Mr. Camplese uses two screens in his classes: one for his own slides and one for live Twitter updates. He encourages his students to tweet feedback, questions, and comments.

This could be a really useful application in churches. Imagine being able to teach a teen class and have their participation go beyond simple discussion to rich interaction via a host of new media outlets: online search, real-time Twitter posts, YouTube video sharing. Imagine how such an approach would allow teenagers to take ownership in their classes and take the lead in discussing and working through the material.

Take it a step further. How useful could providing access to Twitter, projected on a large screen, be during sermons? As an audience listens, they could create a real-time dialogue with other listeners, provide feedback, and ask questions that could become part of a follow-up Q&A time after the sermon. Tweeted questions could also be answered either in real-time, perhaps by an assistant or two who had a copy of the sermon and could relate questions back to the sermon content, or even by the preacher stopping mid-sermon to address a set of questions!

I'm trying to think through the possibilities of this. Hopefully one day soon we'll see the future of how technology can serve the church, rather than seeing technology as the problem, as we do too often in churches.