#onthefenceabouttwitterchats

I have always believed on sitting next to the smartest person in the room. When I first started taking classes at Dominican there were a couple graduates from U of C and one of Harvard. You would always find me sitting next to them. There is always someone to learn from. I wondered how I could increase my PLN to include people that are not in the physical room with me. Twitter Education Chats allow educators from around the world to interact and discuss a certain topic. I recently participated in one and am on the fence about them.

Introduce yourself. (Screen shot)

When I started using “The Twitter” for professional purposes I followed @mrkemp from #whatisschool. He has a lively network of followers and seems to share my views on education so I was interested to see what his Twitter Chat was all about, and, bonus, the topic was interesting: future classrooms.

Getting Ready

I am glad I prepared for my first chat. Turns out that the moderator of the chat I wanted to participate in posted the questions ahead of time on his blog. He also had a handy article about services you can use services to help you manage the speed of the chat. The #whatisschool chat usually has over 100 participants, so it can be tough to keep up.

Like the physical world, introduce yourself with hello and a little something about yourself. Also, answer the questions and don’t try to hijack the chat.

If you find yourself in a chat and unable to keep pace with reading the posts you can check out the transcript, posted after the fact.

Pros of my Twitter Chat

Screen shot of my first Twitter Chat

I have found some great professional educators that I can get ideas from and probably bounce ideas off of.

I realized that there are like-minded people out there that share my positivity about my profession. This was expressed by the retweeting and favoriting of my Tweets by fellow participants.

When I have time I would like to revisit the Twitter Chat, and I plan on reaching out to the new members of my PLN at #whatisschool to bounce some new ideas off them.

Blended Learning

I have found some interesting articles via Twitter, but the Twitter Chat yielded a gold mine: information on blended learning. @TriSciCurious tweeted about blended learning, along with a link to VIDEOS! It really helps me to see teaching practices in action, and this site is exactly what I need. We talk about blended lessons all of the time, but I had a hard time visualizing it my classroom, beyond using the tablet for listening to reading or practicing math facts.

Cons of my Twitter Chat

I have little time to review the resources that were presented by fellow participants. I imagine this will change when I finish my coursework.

Join my PLN and follow me @rheavallarta