The eduFire Blog

I came across this Tweet by Kareem (yep, one of the eduFire founders!) the other day. I thought it was pretty neat, but didn’t realize the potential of it until we talked about it a little. Twitter could be the home of a small revolution! We’re talking about “Demand Driven Teaching,” here.

So, say you want to learn something new, but have no idea where to find that Esperanto teacher of your dreams. With Twitter gaining more and more popularity, there’s bound to be someone there that knows and is willing to teach you Esperanto (and even get paid for it). Here’s what you’d do, if you were a student.

Students

Say there’s something you want to learn. You would fire up your Twitter account and type out a message. Perhaps you want to learn Spanish. You would type in something like “I need to know how to buy things in Spanish for my trip to Spain next month,” then end it with the hashtags #teach-me #edufire. This will show that you want a Spanish teacher, and you want to learn it on eduFire. You will then show up in Twitter’s Search function when you look for #teach-me.

Teachers

Of course, if you’re a teacher, you can always participate in learning something new as well, but you’re probably in it to find some students! The demand is already there, which is good for you, and people are making themselves easy to find. That’s great! All you would do is do a search on Twitter for #teach-me, and then maybe add what you teach, if you want to get more specific. For example, if you typed in #teach-me spanish, you’d find all the people that mentioned #teach-me and Spanish in their Tweets. There aren’t any right now, but hopefully that’s something we can change in the coming months! I would recommend getting a Twitter application like Tweetdeck to help organize your searches and get notified of changes faster!

Use #teach-me and #edufire to Win Prizes!

In April, we’ll be giving out eduFire t-shirts and free class coupons to students who use #teach-me and #edufire in their tweets. We’ll choose a couple of random tweets, as well as a couple of tweets we just really really like. Of course, all the tweets have to be something you actually want to learn (or be a tweet “spreading the word”), otherwise it’s missing the point, so no spamming the hashtag just for the heck of it! That’s cheating!

We look forward to seeing this tweet in action! I think there’s a lot of potential here – and a lot of students and teachers will be able to find each other when this thing takes off. We definitely need your help to spread the word, or to use this hashtag yourself! Thank you everyone for your support!

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