Twitter?

                    Twitter to me has always been the most useful of the social media sites.  The idea that you can broadcast your thoughts and just about anyone could read them and easily search for them i think is a very powerful platform.  If you wanted to find ideas to help you out on a subject you can usually find someone on twitter willing to help you.  You can also find people that have your same interest really quickly and connect to people who share your same principles.  I truly is an online community.  I think that it is amazing way to collaborate with your peers.  However, I have many reservations using twitter as a way of communicating with students from a teacher perspective.  I think it probably comes from the content that I teach as well.  Being a physics teacher the most useful thing about twitter or an other form of outside the class communication is the ability to help students when the get stuck on a problem but it is probably more beneficial for the student getting the help and the person giving the help if that help doesn't come from the teacher but a fellow student.  I think that is where twitter would come in handy for a physics class.  If you could create an online community of your students where they could help each other on the homework or problem sets and only come to the teacher as the last resort.  I don't know if twitter is the best platform for this but it is the best one out there that I know of that is popular enough that just about everyone knows about it or has one and can be used in a collaborative way that could be monitored by the teacher but doesn't always have to be directly influenced by the teacher. 
                 To summarize, I think that introducing students to twitter as a learning tool is a great thing for students life long learning but is hard to use as a high school physics teacher to student communication tool. 

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