Chatter for Professional Learning

The last few years I’ve been fortunate enough to meet and collaborate with awesome educators via social media. Twitter chats such as #pypchat #satchat #satchatoc #kinderchat and recently #coetailchat have been hugely influential for me in terms of my professional learning. What is a Twitter chat? Basically it’s a discussion on Twitter, usually in real time around a topic or set of questions set by the moderators and all you need to do to contribute is to use the #hashtag for that chat somewhere in your tweet (usually at the end). That’s it! Then you can search for the #hashtag and just like a bookmark, you can see all of the tweets posted under that hashtag. There are so many Twitter chats out there (check out @cybraryman1 site, he has curated many chats) and find what suits your interest and time. Just because you can’t join in synchronously doesn’t mean you should not check it out, the chatter often goes on long after the ‘official’ chat time has ended. Most often the moderator has archived the chat to so you can benefit from all of the resources, tweets and ideas people have shared. Lurk …or better yet contribute. Twitter is the best professional learning tool. Last week I co moderated #satchatoc and we were lucky enough to get  Dr. Alec Couros @courosa  as a guest moderator and expert on Digital Literacy. It was an epic chat with folks from all over the globe. The conversations around the questions were great but watching how the

connections and conversations spread even further and evolved around those questions were even more fascinating. So…

• Find a chat that interests you and search for that hashtag
• Find out when the next chat will be run (send out a tweet and ask!)
• Join in, lurk or say hello – we are all there to learn and no one ‘owns’ a chat – we facilitate it
• Have fun and relax- its frantic but you don’t need to read every single tweet!!

Still hesitant to jump in to a #twitterchat?