January 10, 2014 – It's a Twitter Party and You're Invited!

Happy New Year and Welcome Back!!

This week I have chosen to challenge everyone to take Twitter and their PLN to the next level by participating in an educational Twitter chat, also known as a Twitter party. 

A Twitter tweet chat is a pre-arranged discussion that happens via Twitter through the use of Tweets that include a predefined hashtag (#) to link those tweets together in a virtual conversation. Tweet chats are a great forum for educators and administration to learn from other people in their field and to collaborate with their peers. There is no registration or invitations required, just a twitter account and willingness to share or learn from others.  You may wish to follow or simply observe a twitter chat before finding your courage and jumping in as a participant. 

There are various educational topics and discussions occurring throughout the week and on an impromptu basis.  If you would like to view a list of educational twitter chats occurring weekly, simply click on the following link to be directed to an interactive doc listing the weekly educational twitter chats. http://bit.ly/18mkQkw

Some of the more popular educator chats include:  Canadian educators chat #cdnedchat (Monday 8-9pm), Educational technology chat #edtechchat (Monday 8-9pm), Education chat #edchat (Tuesday 7-8pm), and Saturday chat for leaders (educational topics) #satchat (Saturday 7:30-8:30am and 10:30-11:30am). 

During the chat, moderators will post questions with a Q1, Q2, Q3 numbered format, so that responses can be linked and participants can follow along easily.   When responding to the questions, remember to begin your answers with A1, A2, or A3 depending on the question you are responding to and include the hashtag of the chat, so others can find it in the conversation.  

Although you are able to successfully follow a twitter chat directly on the twitter webpage by entering the hashtag in the search bar at the top of the page, (see image to the right) many find using additional tools makes chatting easier.  Tweetdeck (https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/), Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/) (image below) and Tweetchat (http://tweetchat.com/) are online platforms which allow you to organize and stream discussions into columns by hashtag.

Remember, you only have 140 characters to get your idea across so be succinct and respond to the concepts being presented.  Feel free to Retweet (RT) others ideas which ring true to you, and reply to those with whom you wish to interact.  This is a great opportunity to find new educators to follow and gain followers of your own.  

I look forward to hearing how you faced the challenge and what you learned from the experience.

Past Tech Tidbits posts can be found on the blog at

http://techtidbitz.blogspot.ca and if you have an idea for a future blog topic, please feel free to pass it along to me.

Cheers,

Stace