Reflections on My First Twitter Chat

The value of Twitter has increased for me ten-fold now that I know how to participate in Twitter Chats.  For me, the number one reason to use Twitter is to accumulate new ideas, methods, and resources to better the work that I produce and my mindset as a professional educator.  Twitter Chats provide a way to have real-time conversations with other professionals about a topic that interests me.  Furthermore, the conversations are then searchable using the  corresponding hashtag (and even more detailed information), and I can refer back to everything that was said.  

There are several take-aways from these initial Twitter chats.  

• First, When I went back to review my tweets from the chats, I panicked when I couldn’t find all of them.   Then I realized that I was focusing only on my Tweets, and that I needed to hit “Tweets and Replies” to see more.  I wish now that I hadn’t hit the reply button during the Twitter Chat, but had just responded to a question using the appropriate hashtag and answer coding (A1, A6, etc.).  That way, the progression of thoughts that I was going through during the chat would be clearer if someone happens to scroll through my tweets and not my tweets and replies.
• These Twitter Chats were almost like taking notes., but with a fun adrenaline rush as I tried to keep up with the real-time conversation and respond with insightful contributions.
• I met people who are NOT teachers or at least don’t teach at the elementary school level.  It’s refreshing to hear from people who have an entirely fresh or different point of view than my own.  One of my current favorite mantras is “You don’t know what you don’t know.”  You don’t know SO MUCH that could potentially benefit you, and somehow you have to make yourself accessible to that information- to put yourself out there in the path of the oncoming traffic basically.
• I do like that anyone can access the information about the chat at a later date, but there was something so exciting about being very present in a conversation with people from all across the country and world.  I liked that both chats began by having participants introduce themselves because I was immediately hit with the fact that information would be coming from people in a wide cross-section of experiences, careers, and locations, but who all had a shared interest in the topic of conversation.  How valuable is that!

I appreciated the fact that even though I’ve been using Twitter for a year, I’d never done a Twitter Chat on my own.  I’d contributed ideas but not been the person tweeting, which this assignment forced me to do.  I will definitely participate in further chats in the future, and hopefully on a regular basis.