Live Session

One great way to build your PLN is to either host or participate in a Twitter chat they are very easy to do!

Here is how my group went about our twitter chat:

When we started planning our Twitter chat, we first thought of a subject that would be universal to educators, student engagement. Not only is this an important issue across grade levels and curricula, but it is a subject that can be discussed from a variety of angles.

Next, we planned the questions we would ask. We wanted open ended questions that were broad enough to elicit a wide range of responses by diverse groups of teachers. However, with Twitter’s 140 character limit, it is important to keep answers short, so our questions needed to be direct enough to elicit concise responses. Student engagement can be seen through multiple lenses, such as curriculum, discipline, and technology, so we wanted to make sure and include all components of engagement in our questions. Once we had our questions, we assigned time intervals to each, giving participants enough time to respond without get bored or distracted. We also wanted to allow time for discussion and clarification after the initial questions were asked.

We picked 2:00 on a Friday, hoping that teachers, newly freed from their school days, would be able to participate. Using TweetDeck, we created the discussion: the schedule, questions, intervals, and time. We advertised to our peers in our class and in our schools by sending out tweets with the time and the discussion hashtag. We also advertised by sending invitations to education Twitter groups who might be interested in a discussion about student engagement. A few days prior to the chat, we sent reminders to our potential audience.

A few days before the chat, we had programmed in reminders and the appearance of a poster to refresh participants on the rules of good chat etiquette. We also displayed a reminder of the process of responding to questions and the need to include the hashtag. We used the Q (Question) and A (Answer) format, to organize our chat. When tech resources were mentioned, we added them using the “@” symbol to encourage anyone associated with that hashtag to join. We greeted the people who joined the chat, making them welcome, and we responded to their answers by making comments and asking for clarifications. We also asked follow up questions if the discussion slowed down.

We stored our chat on Storify. After we discovered that we need to scroll to the bottom of the twitter chat and signify that we wanted the entire chat, we again stored it. We now have our entire chat recorded on Storify.

The entire process of creating a Twitter chat is user friendly, and the ability to pre-program the chat gives all participants the ability to focus on the discussion rather than the process. Our preparation worked well, except the time we chose. Friday afternoon turned out to be a difficult time for teachers to log on, even during summer hours. However, we did get a few fellow students from class to join, and our time was well spent in the fruitful discussion about student engagement that ensued.

Follow along on our twitter chat about engagement in the link below:

Reflection Questions:

1. What were the strengths and weaknesses of your Live Session?

In our live session, a strength was that the conversation continuously moved. There was not much lag time during the chat. This was because we built off each others questions. There were often more questions asked from the participants and lots of great dialogue about engagement. I think that the biggest weakness was that we did not have as many participants as we would have liked. Although a lot of our classmates joined at some point or another, I was hoping that more outside participants would have joined.

2. How many new followers do you estimate you gained as a result of hosting your Twitter chat?

I received about 3 followers after our twitter chat. I think by mentioning tech tools we used it allowed for more people to see our chat. I mentioned OneNote, Nearpod and Kahoot, which allowed them to reach out to our chat as well.

3. How has/will this change impacted/impact your PLN?

After hosting my own Twitter Chat and realizing how easy it is to set up, I plan to both host and participate in more chats. I think by even participating in twitter chats it allows your PLN to grow. You start to connect to more people and organizations. I also gained a lot of different perspectives from other educators. Twitter chats can give you more ideas from other educators that maybe you didn't think of.

4. What will you change and/or add in future live sessions? Why?

I definitely would advertise for it more to allow more participants in the chat. I think hearing from more people would allow more insight and different techniques and strategies. However, if there are a lot of participants, there may need to be more time between questions to allow more people to add in.

5. Based on your analysis and feedback from participants, what is your plan for future live sessions? Why?

I would have to say the same as in question 4, we needed more advertisement. I think by planning our chat so soon, we did not have enough time to reach out to more people. Again, having more people in the chat will allow for more discussion and ideas.