So, I tried something new with our students and faculty this past weekend having to do with our all-school summer reading book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I posted some thoughts about the plan in an earlier post.
In a nutshell, I invited the faculty and students to join me for a twitter chat about the book the past Sunday evening. I posted instruction on how to follow a twitter chat for those non-twitter users and even created a Jing video to show them how to join the chat. I even went so far as to create a webdoc as a sort of promotional piece for the chat.
So, how did it go? While I was hoping for more people to join in, I was not all that surprised at the limited turn out. There were a bunch of students who joined in, a few parents of current students and a couple of colleagues as well. Given that school is still a few weeks away, I do not blame people for not wanting to join a discussion about the summer reading just yet. On the plus side, there were students from CT, GA, ME, CA and a few other states along with a student in Korea participating…pretty cool actually.
I know that very few of my colleagues are avid Twitter users which did not help. One of my goals this year is to encourage, promote and model how wonderful Twitter and PLNs can be for professional development.
Will I try it again? Definitely! I am fortunate enough to get to deliver a convocation talk to the entire community in the first few weeks of school about the book. I plan on hosting another twitter chat about the book following my talk. Hopefully, by then everybody will have read the book and will be more inclined to engage in academic pursuits on a Sunday evening. Stay tuned….I will post something after the talk and let you know how it went.
If anybody has experience with this type of twitter chat and their school community, I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.