Saturday, August 6, 2011

A Grand Experiment in Twitter Collaboration

Since I'm not in any schools right now, I've been looking for a way to get to teacher's smart ideas. I've recently mined a whole new Twitter vein-- teacher hash groups. For any one not aware, these are topical hash tag "umbrellas" under which users organize their tweets. This allows for organized discussion. These hash tags are proving to be invaluable to me: # sschat (social studies), # engchat (english/language arts) # mathchat, # realmath, and # pbl. (rrr blogger dn allow hashtags-- you probably know there's no space between the hash mark and the tag) Your twitter client should let you sort incoming tweets by hash tag, which filters them from the entire twitterverse (not just tweets of folks you follow). Chrome's Silverbird has a field at top right for hash tags. A picture might explain better. In my tweet I asked people to review, improve and add project sketches to a growing collection. Several followers of #pbl have retweeted since I posted a few minutes ago. I've used hash posting and sorting for events (# ISTE11) and such, but I'm coming late to the game on this functionality. Very cool! What hash groups do you recommend?

Oh, and here's a link to the Google doc Project Sketches I've asked folks to contribute to. Have some ideas you'd like to add? Have at it!