Microblogging in the Science Classroom

After lurking in the shadows of the Twitter world, I have mixed feelings about using the tool in the classroom. I think kids these days are used to immediate satisfaction, and Twitter can certainly deliver it. Twitter could be used to answer quick questions or post links that might be helpful or interesting to students, however it would be a lot of work for a single teacher to keep up with if the students became dependent upon the instant feedback. It might be a tool that a collaboration of science teachers could update as a team. As a negative, "not every student is excited to see a professor's message on his or her cellphone", and at the high school level it may be inappropriate to have such close communication with students.
Two tweeter tools that could be useful in the classroom are Hashtages and Tweetbeeps, both allow users to search for specific topics of interest. As a project, students could search a topic and find someone who is tweeting about it, then write about what they learned from their tweets.
I think with the time restrains in a high school setting, and a set curriculum, twitter would be too time consuming to keep up with and use effectively. However, a class that has more freedom may find twitter and all it's tools a great communication tool.

http://www.noupe.com/tools/25-incredibly-useful-twitter-tools-and-firefox-plugins.html
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i25/25a01501.htm