Twitter chatting with #edtechchat

For the twitter assignment this week, I decided to join tonight's #edtechchat on twitter and I interacted with fellow students, teachers, professionals, and administrators. Although I am a semi-frequent twitterer, I have never before participated in a twitter chat, nor have I used it for educational means so this was an experience. 

What I like about the #edtechchat:

• Anybody who wants to get involved in the conversation can. There were pre-service teachers along with long-term professionals all involved in answering questions and discussing with each other.
• Twitter chat is a very interactive feature. You can favorite other peoples' tweets, re-tweet, and respond, creating a very communicative base for sharing responses and opinions.
• Twitter chat is instant. In the twitter chat, responses appear the moment they are posted so it is easy to keep track of and follow the conversations occuring.
• The chat was clearly labeled! The organization system established with a moderator and labeled Qs and As made it easy to see what everybody was responding to and what the focus of the chat was. 
• Cooperation is rampant. All users responded to one another and there was a lot of respect shown for the many individual opinions presented.
• Twitter represents modern technology. What better way for teachers to discuss educational technology than by using it?

What I do not like about the #edtechchat:

• The chat moves extremely quickly. This means that a lot of the responses disappear before I have the time to read all of them and I felt pressured to respond quickly without thinking my responses through as much as I would have liked to.
• Twitter has a character limit! I struggled with posting what I wanted without cutting out a bunch of characters and I had to delete a bit to fit the hashtag. I almost think a chat with a shorter hashtag would be better because it would buy me a few more letters for my response!

Even though I had a few frustrations, the twitter chat that I participated in featured questions such as "why does our students' future really compel the transformation of today's schools? Or does it not?", "What should digital learning look like in the classroom?" and "How should a school district support professional learning to promote the conversion to a digital classroom?". Teachers participating in this chat shared resources that I was able to favorite for later reference and I was able to express my own opinion and see how what I have to say lines up with what my colleagues believe. This chat was a bit confusing for a first time user and I think that some of my responses were not as good as they could have been because I posted before thinking out how to best say what I wanted to in 160 characters or less, but it was a really cool thing to be a part of and I can see myself using twitter in the classroom in the future.