Twitterchatting

I followed the #eltchat on Twitter on Wednesday morning. The majority of teachers who attended the chat were from England but there were also teachers who were living and teaching abroad in places like Saudi Arabia. I thought that having teachers with varied backgrounds helped to stimulate the conversation and produced diverse observations and suggestions. The topic of the chat was the importance of the starting and ending of a lesson. What I liked about the chat was that it was informal, that anyone was welcome and could post a comment or idea. Also, I found that several participants had some interesting ideas of how to organize the beginning and ending of class. There were also some links and references given to reading material and resources on the topic. I found the tone of the chat to be very positive, welcoming and open to ideas. There was a lot of positive feedback and encouragement between participants.

I will say though that the format of a Twitterchat is somewhat confusing and hard to keep up with. There were multiple conversations going on at once so it could be somewhat hard to follow one train of thought. Also not everyone followed the specific questions that were posted by the moderator and a few participants would go off subject and make jokes. Due to the rapid nature of the chat sometimes the new question that was posted was not seen and people kept posting about the last question or they did not like/understand a question and ignored it. Ultimately though a Twitterchat is an informal venue so that is what is nice about it, participants can comment on what they want and say what they want without too much censorship. I liked the experience and can see that it could be useful for professional development and for networking. There were many useful ideas expressed in a short period of time and I felt that there were things that I could try to implement in class.