With the school year coming so quickly my wife and I got the opportunity to take a quick family vacation to the mountains of Arizona. While we were up there I decided to take some time to try out a twitter chat. One of my main goals this school year is to take advantage of Twitter for professional development. With that in mind, I logged on to Twitter Monday night for the inaugural #RoleTalk chat and it was great.
Since it was the first time there weren’t an overwhelming amount of people participating, but that left us the ability to really talk with each other. I use TweetDeck to track all my hashtags and it really does help. I was able to monitor the overall scope of the chat while responding to certain people’s posts. I really like Twitter for intaking information, but I do find it difficult to decipher some people’s tones. I find that I see discourse on Twitter as a confrontation rather than a conversation so that will take some getting used to this year. During the half hour I was able to participate I was able to both receive responses from other people about the ROLE classroom, but also help people find solutions to their own questions. I really like the near constant flow of information during the chat as well as the ability to develop relationships with like-minded educators.
My plan for the year is to try and participate in two chats, #gtchat and #rolechat, as often as I can. Hopefully throughout the year I’ll post some reflections on how the chats have influenced my classroom. Between blogging and chatting, it should be a great year. I’m really looking forward to this school year and seeing how I can innovate in my classroom and evolve as a teacher.