Learning & Leading Through Technology

with participants. Most moderators pose 5–10 questions, but supplementary questions, diversions, and side conversations are common too.

Although the moderators contribute important ideas to the chats, they usually try not to dominate discourse or control the flow of conversation to the same extent that a presenter might in a traditional PD workshop. In fact, some chat organizers empower participants by allowing them to select each week’s topic through an online poll that they tweet out and/or post on the chat’s website.

How Do I Participate in a Chat?

A diverse array of education chats is
continuously emerging (see “Give a
Chat a Chance,” pages 12–13). Some
chats end up attracting participants,
while others fail to find a long-term
audience. Last year many state-based
chats, such as #KSed for Kansas edu-
cators, sprung up as opportunities to
connect and share resources with
nearby educators. Numerous book
group chats, which tend to be ad hoc
conversations that typically exist for
a short period of time, also started
last year. For example, Dave Burgess’s
(@burgessdave) Teach Like a Pirate
spawned book chats that he led as well
as several spinoff chats that centered on
applying the ideas of his book to spe-
cific educational contexts. And Clinton
Public Schools in Oklahoma uses chats
to connect educators within and across
schools with the hashtag #cpsreds.

It’s easy to take part in a Twitter chat.

First, be sure your privacy controls are set to make your tweets public so all chat participants, not just your followers, can see them. Although it is possible to participate in chats using the regular Twitter interface, we recommend setting up a third-party account with a service like HootSuite or Tweet-Deck. These free services link to your Twitter account and allow you to more conveniently manage tweets and chats by creating multiple “streams” or columns that aggregate tweets by hashtag or search term. This will make it much easier to follow the flow of a chat and contribute.

To keep track of which answers go with which questions, moderators typically label each question with Q1, Q2, and so on. Participants, in turn, preface answers with A1, A2, etc., so it’s clear which question they are answering.

This approach allows participants to join chats late, discuss a particularly interesting question beyond the designated chat time, or catch up with conversations. Although anyone is welcome to ask questions of all participants, it’s good etiquette to generally respect the moderator’s role of guiding the conversation.

Chats are generally welcoming environments, and many chat moderators support and encourage new chatters. Researchers Ceren Budak and Rakesh Agrawal, who have studied Twitter chats, found that newcomers feel socially included when fellow chat participants mention and retweet them.

But they warn that more established chats with numerous regulars can be less inviting to outsiders and that the quantity of tweets or links shared might initially be overwhelming. Twitter has been compared to a waterfall: Users can hold out their cups to collect the water they need but shouldn’t worry about everything that passes by. Twitter chats, in particular, involve an immense amount of information and educational ideas, so keep in mind that it is pretty much impossible to digest it all.