Saturday, August 6, 2011

A Grand Experiment in Twitter Collaboration

Since I'm not in any schools right now, I've been looking for a way to get to teacher's smart ideas. I've recently mined a whole new Twitter vein-- teacher hash groups. For any one not aware, these are topical hash tag "umbrellas" under which users organize their tweets. This allows for organized discussion. These hash tags are proving to be invaluable to me: # sschat (social studies), # engchat (english/language arts) # mathchat, # realmath, and # pbl. (rrr blogger dn allow hashtags-- you probably know there's no space between the hash mark and the tag) Your twitter client should let you sort incoming tweets by hash tag, which filters them from the entire twitterverse (not just tweets of folks you follow). Chrome's Silverbird has a field at top right for hash tags. A picture might explain better. In my tweet I asked people to review, improve and add project sketches to a growing collection. Several followers of #pbl have retweeted since I posted a few minutes ago. I've used hash posting and sorting for events (# ISTE11) and such, but I'm coming late to the game on this functionality. Very cool! What hash groups do you recommend?

Oh, and here's a link to the Google doc Project Sketches I've asked folks to contribute to. Have some ideas you'd like to add? Have at it!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might be interested in some of the scheduled Twitter chats like #edchat. Here's a list of many chats on a wide range of topics.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhisaMy5TGiwcnVhejNHWnZlT3NvWFVPT3Q4NkIzQVE&hl=en_US

I participate sometimes in #lrnchat, but that tends to be more corporate focused than K-12 education.

Natalie said...

I use twitter to branch out to other people who are interested in the same topics I happen to be obsessed or interested in. I've used the chat format to explore questions surrounding a topic or even solve problems.

Anonymous said...

You truly made this wonderful! this gave me a couple of ideas on what to do next! Thanks a lot!
Appreciation Letter to Boss

Colette Cassinelli said...

I use #tlchat for sharing with Teacher Librarians

R. Ryan said...

I've been trying to start a #sentences tag based on a suggestion I got from another teacher. Right now, I use Twitter to post "best student sentences" and sentences that follow certain patterns, so it would be great if other teachers who do similar things could use the hashtag for outstanding student sentences.