section_path: Society/Impact/Education
section_name: Education
paragraph_text: Education
  
  Twitter has been adopted as a communication and learning tool in educational and research settings mostly in colleges and universities. It has been used as a backchannel to promote student interactions, especially in large-lecture courses. Research has found that using Twitter in college courses helps students communicate with each other and faculty, promotes informal learning, allows shy students a forum for increased participation, increases student engagement, and improves overall course grades.
  
  Twitter has been an increasingly growing in the field of education as an effective tool that can be used to encourage learning and idea, or knowledge sharing, in and outside the classroom. By using or creating hashtags, students and educators are able to communicate under specific categories of their choice to enhance and promote education. A broad example of a hashtag used in education is "edchat", to communicate with other teachers and people using that hashtag. Once teachers find someone they want to talk to, they can either direct message the person or narrow down the hashtag to make the topic of the conversation more specific, using hashtags for scichat (science), engchat (English), sschat (social studies).