A little reflection on the first Twitter Chat

Thanks to Anna Tate at St. Joseph's in Fielding for hosting 2 really energised chats last week. It really kicked off our #NZreadaloud for Term 2 in an exciting way.

As you can see from Anna's welcome tweet, we had 37 people reply and introduce themselves.

The kids' Tweets show they have taken on board the appropriate way to write a tweet when we are all using one class account.

One thing we want to promote in our chats is the involvement of the teachers. As you can see from this example below, when we reply personally and finish with another question, we invite conversation which hopefully leads to deeper thinking and critical thinking.

The BEST thing though is when the students understand that replying to someone is really what we want from a Twitter chat. As you can see from the examples below, one question results in a response which can then be responded to by someone else who then asks another question. This is the exciting stuff!

The example below shows how when WE put some time into replying and finish with a further question, we can elicit some deeper thinking and justification for a statement.

I guess this post is to show some examples of what we are wanting from our chats. We don't want kids tweeting an answer and not engaging in any of the other tweets. We have made a great start and let's build on this. But it will take us as adults modelling what we want to see.

Next week we have the author involved. Thursday and Friday Giselle Clarkson has agreed to be online to interact with the kids. Hopefully the time suit many of you and we can have some thoughtful tweet conversation happening. I am excited! 

Mā te wā

Kerri