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Have a book study via Twitter? Yes we did!

March 5, 2014 by Amber 1 Comment


pirates-on-pirate-shipw_yr

Time is a hot commodity for anyone, but especially for teachers at the beginning of the year. Knowing this when it came time for our staff development plans, the idea of book study made us yawn. How can you spice up a book study, engage your staff in a digital environment, and promote a digital presence?

You have a book study chat on Twitter!

We started by choosing a book we knew would have an immediate impact on classrooms, “Teach Like a Pirate”. It set the tone for the whole inservice, and we were able to go with a “pirate” theme. (I love a good theme!) Teachers were given their books with an intro the first day we came back. We divided the book into 4 parts, gave the dates that each part was to be completed by. So as not to overwhelm, because this was a lot of teachers first foray into Twitter, we decided there would be just three questions for each part. I gave a very basic session on the in’s and out’s of Twitter. We created our accounts and wrote our bios, making sure they represented our educationally interest. We talked about hashtags, chats, and the purpose of this “global” learning space.

The book study questions were to be answered via twitter, using the hashtag #WTLAP. (Watson Teach Like a Pirate)
We used a Q1, A1 format to answer on the date given for each set of questions. The official #WTLAP chat was from 8-8:30pm, but they had 24 hours to respond to the questions before I “storified” the results.
This allowed everyone to scroll back through the tweets.
http://storify.com/amberteamann/wtlap-book-study-chat-9-9-2013.html
What did this accomplish?

  • It created a presence on Twitter for our staff, which helped lead to the next step of creating our #WMST hashtag, to start to document our #eduwins for all of our stakeholders.
  • The awareness of others to follow, based on the conversations happening, built a base for many teachers to create their own PLN.
  • It allowed other educational connections to be formed. We had several educators from around the world join in our chat which removed the “walls” from around our building.
  • Teachers were able to think and creatively share their responses for an audience of more than just our staff, including author, Dave Burgess who joined us our first night.
  • We were able to spend time in our campus based learning meetings focused on other instructional matters, since this was all done on their own time.
  • Teachers who needed support were able to ask and recieve help privately, on their own ability level. This was an incredible opportunity to offer my help and really get to know our teachers.

Here’s our handout, #WTLAP.

Special thanks to Chris Kesler, who lent me his official TLAP chat questions that we were able to modify for our staff.
chattingly,
Amber

Filed Under: Social Media, Staff Development, Vision Tagged With: #admin, #cpchat, #edchat, #txed, #WMST

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  1. Amber Teamann | says:
    June 13, 2022 at 4:16 pm

    […] was the year we did a private Facebook group with George Couros on “Innovators Mindset”. Twitter also was a tool of choice when we read “Teach Like a Pirate”. All that to say…I’m a big believer in […]

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