An Inside Look at Using Twitter with Students: Our Third Twitter Chat

photo by Matt Hamm CC BY-NC 2.0

This past week, the teachers, students, and principal of LearnQuebec’s online school had our third all-school twitter chat. Three is a magic number. Once you’ve done something three times, it starts to become a habit. You also start to notice trends, behaviours, what works best, and what doesn’t. Most importantly, you get an idea of how it’s evolving, if it’s gaining traction, and we are all now convinced we are onto something!

A little background:

Our classroom (students’ names appear in chat area at lower left,
hidden here of course)

• We’re synchronous online classroom teachers. Our students are in brick and mortar schools all day but when it’s time for Math, Science, Physics, or Chemistry, they get online with us. They are from all over Quebec, many in remote areas. We’re all pretty used to interacting live online, in fact, we pretty much crave it due to the lack of f2f time.
• By “all-school”, I mean all of our teachers, all of our students, and our principal.
• Most of the teachers already use Twitter with their students, so most of them already had accounts and were comfortable using it.
• At the beginning of each year, we get permission from the parents of our students to be online in many sites – google drive, twitter, blogs, geogebratube….and the list just keeps growing every year. So that part was already taken care of.
• For non-Tweeters: A twitter chat is what happens when a bunch of people all get on Twitter at the same time to tweet at each other. It’s like a party that happens online, except that you can actually have way more conversations with way more people at a twitter chat than you could ever manage at a party.

The story so far:

We started having these twitter chats in February of this year. Our purpose was to create a stronger sense of community amongst our online students, whom we almost never get to see face to face, and who almost never get to see each other. Here’s a quick synopsis of the first two chats:

Chat 1: Feb. 5, 2014:  If you’d like to read all the details of this wonderful event, including the actual tweets that happened that night, I blogged all about it here. If you’d rather not read that whole chapter, allow me to summarize: It was great! We decided on 5 questions, the theme of which was online learning – the one thing that unites all of us. The participation rate was very encouraging – we had about 35% of them there, and by the end of the evening, there were about 700 tweets with the #lqchat hashtag. The staff were all so thrilled by the event that we spontaneously had a staff meeting immediately afterward to debrief! We were so blown away by how enthusiastic our students were about the opportunity to interact this way. It took a while to calm down! My takeaway was that every human needs to connect, regardless of age, academic interest, or what medium you use. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Chat 2: March 12, 2014:  Unfortunately, I didn’t blog about this one, not because it wasn’t great or important though! You can see the complete chat here, separated into questions. Summary: This time we used some of our students’ suggestions for chat topics, like career plans. The theme was still online-based, but also looking to the future – theirs and ours. Once again, the staff met afterwards to take it all in together. Chats can be quite overwhelming. Not only is the sheer volume of tweets impossible to keep up with, but the stimulation generated by all the ideas and connections can be quite overpowering as well. We had about the same amount of participation, and we were once again thrilled by it all. As a side note, suddenly there was more tweeting happening on a daily basis from some of the more reluctant tweeters on our staff! My takeaway – sometimes to get from A to B you have to aim for C, and then unexpectedly end up at B on your way there.

Our latest chapter:

Chat 3: April 22, 2014: This time, we asked for the students’ ideas in a more concrete way. Peggy Drolet made a google spreadsheet for them in which to give their input. The staff met, and together came up with the questions, using as many of their suggestions as possible, while keeping it safe, appropriate, non-academic, and interesting. Unfortunately, as I write this, Storify is not fully cooperating, at the moment, in giving us the full set of tweets for all the questions, so I have had to take a few snips to give you an idea of the flavour of the responses.

Prechat:

Here the Storify for the prechat chatting that took place. As it happened, that night there was also a very important hockey game happening at the exact same time as our chat. This hockey game happened to involve the Montreal Canadians. Have I mentioned we are all Canadians? Living in Quebec? So, of course, we get a little excited about hockey. More than a few people were, um, multi-tasking during the chat! These happened before and during the chat:

And finally, here are the actual chat questions, with a few of the responses:

Q1: What is the happiest/proudest you have ever been in your life?

Q2 What is the coolest thing about math/science?

Q3: What is your favourite pastime/hobby?

Q4: What tech tool is your favourite & why?

Q5: What about you would people find the most surprising?

Q6: What is something that you are not learning presently in school that you want to learn?

This last question took an interesting and unexpected turn toward the end!

A few other things that happened:

An idea was hatched for us all to do our own version of Pharrell’s Happy video!

Our students’ personalities, sense of humour revealed themselves:

And as usual, our fabulous principal was there and supportive “like a boss”!

Finally, the day after the chat, we all asked our students to type their reactions on the eboard in class. I have taken snips of those and put them on this padlet wall, word for word. Yes indeed, I really think we’re onto something!