Whew! After several failed attempts I finally managed to participate in my first Twitter chat. I joined #pblchat which meets every Tuesday at 8pm CST. PBL stands for problem based learning. The topic for this chat was assessing 21st Century skills. The chat was very lively and there were many great ideas being bounced around. I had observed, but not participated in, an #edchat last week and I found it incredibly difficult to follow. Things were flying by so quickly that before I had a thought fully formulated, the flow of the conversation had moved on to another area. In this chat, there were fewer contributors than the edchat and I felt able to contribute more to the discussion. Fortunately, I learned from my fellow classmates and logged into the chat via twitterchat.com. While I prefer Tweetdeck for organizing different columns, twitterchat is definitely a vast improvement for participating in an actual chat. One of greatest benefits is the hashtag for the chat is automatically inserted in the tweets eliminating the need to type it every time. The one problem I did run into while using twitterchat was the reply function stopped working properly about halfway through the chat. Initially I could hit the reply button and it would include the person’s name I was replying to in the tweet. I am sure I could have fixed the problem by logging out and back in, but I did not want to miss any of the dialogue. Another issue I noticed was many of the participants did not teach at a public school setting which made some of the conversation lack relevance. The ideas and principles behind the chat were valid and interesting, but some of the methods discussed would not work in the public schools I am familiar with. There were also many acronyms used that I was unfamiliar with. I had several windows open in my background to look up terminology and acronyms. Overall the chat was a positive experience. I did end up following several new people from the chat which I hope will broaden my personal learning network. I added some new words to my vocabulary (curation!) and discovered a few websites to further explore. One of the shared links I found interesting showed Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. There was also a call from @susieboss to help create a document showing how teachers teach and assess 21st Century skills using problem based learning. If you have an example, you can find the document here.To improve the chat experience, I highly recommend using either twitterchat or something similar. Tweetdeck just does not update quickly enough and the need to type the hashtag every tweet can be bothersome. I also discovered after the chat that an archive is kept. I think it would have been helpful for me to look over the archives of past chats so I knew what to expect.
I look forward to participating in additional Twitter chats!
