1.

0 INTRODUCTION

Technology is almost everywhere in this 21st century, entwined in almost every part of
our culture. It affects how we live, work, play and most importantly learn. There are many
emerging online resources that can be used to engage pupils during in-class lessons, such as
the social media. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are not only used by people
to socialize and engage but it is also increasingly being used in classrooms to carry out teaching
and learning (Garba, Byabazaire & Busthami, n.d.). This paper will determine on whether the
use of Facebook or Twitter is more effective in conducting a lesson based on the topic ‘Things I
Do’ for Year 3 pupils. The lesson is to write on the things pupils do in the morning, afternoon
and evening. Pupils will post their work on the social media platform with a picture attached. The
evaluation will be done in terms of their interactivity and whether the platform is user friendly.

2.0 EVALUATION CRITERIA

2.1 Interactivity

In terms of interactivity, Twitter is able to provide more than Facebook does. With
Twitter, pupils can post their work to be seen by people who follows their Twitter account, which
they are denominated as “follower(s)”. More amazingly, people who are not their follower can
have the opportunity to view their posts as well when a follower shares their posts. Hence, a
simple sharing from someone with a lot more followers can allow pupils to reach out to a bigger
audience. Facebook on the other hand enables pupils to connect with a limited audience.
Pupil’s post can only be seen by those who are their “friends” of their Facebook account. When
pupils post up their work on Facebook, it can only be seen by their circle of friends and family,
which are people that they have a connection with. In relation to the chosen topic, Twitter is
better to be used to conduct this lesson for its audience access. When pupils upload their daily
journal on Twitter, their work will not only be seen by their people of their connection, they can
further engage with artists or poets who have read of their work. They are able to get feedback
from not only their teacher but others as well. Thus, this provides wider opportunity for pupils to
express their talents and creativity can be spread.
2.2 User-friendly

On a generic note, Facebook would be seen to be more user friendly than Twitter for its
character limit. For one post, Facebook has a character limit of more than 60,000 characters
(Protalinski, 2011) while Twitter is only limited to 280 characters (Wagner, 2017). However,
teachers can make use of the limitations of Twitter to enhance pupils’ productivity. In
correspondence of the chosen topic, the lesson can be carried out by giving a word limit
towards pupils’ production of their work. Pupils are allowed to craft their post for their daily
journal within a limited character count only. It challenges pupils to know the right word for every
situation to get the entire message across. This encourages pupils to expand their vocabulary
so that they don’t use collections of little words to say what they mean, they jump right to it. All
in all, pupils are stimulated to expand their creativity within. Moreover, this word limit feature on
Twitter gives assistance to pupils of lower language proficiency to build confidence to write. A
blank white page that holds hundreds of words, demanding you fill in each line margin to margin
is intimidating, while 280 characters is not. It is easier for pupils to write 280 characters about a
topic. With this practise, pupils will gradually gain the skills of writing as they progress from
writing in simple sentences to thinking about conciseness when writing. Facebook on the other
hand, which allows users to write lengthy posts will not be able to consent teachers to carry out
the lesson for the chosen topic in a manner that Twitter would allow. Therefore, the drawback of
Twitter’s character limit can actually be fully made use of work in the teachers’ ways so Twitter
can be said to be better used to conduct the lesson of the chosen topic.

3.0 CONCLUSION

To conclude, while both Facebook and Twitter have almost similar functions, Twitter
reign supreme in conducting the lesson of the chosen topic. This is due to its interactivity, as
well as Twitter is a user friendly social media platform. In order to improvise this social media
platform for the use of educational purposes, Twitter can consider having a grammar check
feature for its users to produce a grammatically well-structured post. This ensures the quality of
each post and furthermore help out teachers and pupils while using Twitter in teaching and
learning.
References

Garba, S. A., Byabazaire, Y. & Busthami, A. H. (n.d.). Toward the use of 21st century teaching
learning approaches: the trend of development in Malaysian schools within the context
of Asia Pacific. Retrieved from http://journals.sfu.ca/onlinejour/index.php/i-
jet/article/viewFile/4717/3593

Protalinski, E. (2011). Facebook increases status update character limit to 63,206. Retrieved
from https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-increases-status-update-character-limit-to-
63206/

Wagner, K. (2017). Twitter is testing a big change: doubling the length of tweets from 140 to 280
characters. Retrieved from https://www.recode.net/2017/9/26/16364002/twitter-longer-
tweets-character-limit-140-280