On My First Experience with Twitter Chats and Online Professional Learning Networks

Image Source: Twitter

I don’t like Twitter very much. I avoided it for the first few years of its existence, and when I was forced two years ago to get a Twitter account to promote my work at Chicago Public Radio, I used it begrudgingly. Brevity has never been my strong suit, so the 140 character limit has always been tough for me, and I didn’t enjoy the rapid fire nature of Twitter feeds. My Twitter usage eventually tapered off to nothing after a little over a year, and I was not too excited to have to rejoin Twitter as part of EDU560.

            Using my new Twitter account for the purposes of finding educational resources and connecting with other education professionals has turned my opinion around somewhat. If you follow enough people and organizations (I’m at 159 as of this writing), you get bombarded with hundreds of tweets each day, many of which link to articles and other resources. For instance, I followed ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education, because it seemed appropriate for this class. ISTE is a tremendous resource for innovative ideas in educational technology, and one article in particular jumped out at me. I did my Trends in Ed Tech presentation on Creative Commons, and open education, along with copyright law as it pertains to education, have become major interests for me. ISTE post numerous articles about navigating the messy world of internet copyrights, and their article “Find free and fair use photos,” gives several insights into how to protect your students from breaking copyright law while working on school projects. The author, Keith Ferrell, lists several resources for finding free and licensed photos for student use online. He also describes a project that he does with his own fifth grade students in order to explain why these resources are so important. He easily does so, and also provides a great example of how to integrate technology into lessons with his book trailer project.

            Twitter makes it easy to stumble upon resources like this. Just sit in front of your Twitter feed for a few minutes and you’re bound to find something useful. However, this kind of resource search is more practical using Google or another search engine instead of Twitter, so that aspect hasn’t done too much to sell me on Twitter’s value, although Twitter Chats did a bit. Early on the morning of March 7 (6:30am, to be exact, since the start time was set by people living on the east coast), I joined my first #satchat. From what I understand, #satchat is one of the larger Ed Chats around (with people from all over the world participating), and to say that it could be overwhelming is an understatement. For much of the chat, I couldn’t even read entire tweets before they got pushed out of sight on the feed. It was hard to follow the conversations that other people were having. I saw people’s replies but not the original tweets, and the lack of context made it hard to understand everything that people were saying. Every time I tried to reply to someone, I lost track of the entire chat and had to struggle to reorient myself after I finished typing. I was able to have a few conversations with other educators in the course of the chat, although they were pretty cursory considering the 140 character limit.

A look at the #satchat feed and some of the interactions I was having with other professionals. Image source: Tweetdeck

            On the other hand, the #satchat was well structured, with six questions and posted start times for each question, making it a little easier to hang on to what people were talking about. Also, the one-on-one conversations I had with some people during the course of the #satchat were great, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to converse with other educators around the country (getting treated as an equal in the conversations even though I’m not yet a licensed teacher was great too). This kind of professional learning network can be very valuable in giving us perspectives and ideas that we might not otherwise be exposed to in our own districts. I still don’t love Twitter, but I’m looking forward to the next #satchat. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up this next time.