A Twitter chat is nothing more than an agreement by a group of people to be on Twitter at a particular time. A moderator will post questions related to the chat's topic; participants can then answer those questions, pose other questions, reply to others, and have discussions. To make it easy to find all the tweets for the chat in one place, everyone agrees to use the same hashtag, or label, for their tweets. We'll use #SDUHSDchat as our hashtag, meaning that label should be in every tweet for the chat.
We're going to schedule three chats before the end of the school year, each on Tuesday nights from 8:00 to 8:30. Here are our topics for each:
- May 27 - Using Twitter for Good
- June 3 - Changes in Your Class Next Year
- June 10 - Summer Plans
Our team of moderators includes Michelle Anderson (@mathmama), math teacher at La Costa Canyon High School; Lori Meyer (@meyerteacher), English teacher at Carmel Valley Middle School; Bjorn Paige (@bjornpaige), current AP at La Costa Canyon and future Principal at Diegueno Middle School; and yours truly (@kfairchild6).
To read these chats, you don't even need a Twitter account; you just need to go to twitter.com/#SDUHSDchat and you'll be able to see what others are writing. In order to participate, you need to sign up for an account at twitter.com. It's free and easy to do, and you'll thank yourself later on. If you have an account but need a little help with how things work, take a look at this great website: Mom, This is How Twitter Works. If you're an advanced user, consider using a Twitter client with columns, such as Tweetdeck on a computer or Plume on Android.
Many people think of Twitter as social media, for frivolous use only. If that's what you find, then you are following the wrong people. I have found Twitter to be the single best way to keep me in contact with colleagues around the world and to learn about resources and ideas that are useful in my job. People smarter than I have described Twitter as a huge flowing river of professional learning, that you can approach with a spoon or with a bucket. It's any-time, any-place, any-pace professional learning. If you have any questions about getting started with Twitter, please let me know!
