Turning Teachers into Tweachers Part II

Several weeks ago as I was preparing for my campus staff development, I wrote a blog entry entitled Turning Teachers into Tweachers. I have been amazed and humbled by the response and support from fellow educators. If I have tracked the article successfully, it was exposed to over 2000 educators around the globe. Like I said, that’s humbling.

I previously established three goals for my teachers as I turned them into Tweachers:

1) Establish a PLN through the use of twitter feeds.
2) Learn to use Twitter as a global instructional tool.
3) Enter the world of Social Media.

What happened during our staff development week absolutely blew me away. I should have known – these ladies are some of the best I’ve ever seen. By the time they all arrived on campus, the majority of them had established a Twitter account. As we moved through our professional development topics, I stopped periodically and asked them to Twitter their responses and thoughts. While some were hesitant, others dove in headfirst. To alleviate some of the anxiety, I asked those who had a mobile device to share with their neighbor who may not have a device. In addition, I asked for a response from the grade level or department instead of each individual teacher.

Examples of how I used Twitter during professional development:

** Just after a session on differentiated instructional techniques, I asked the teachers to tweet one instructional technique they were going to implement.

** During our session outlining the implementation of the Daily 5 Guided Reading, I asked the teachers to tweet one concern they had relating to implementing this in their classroom.

My goal was to have them using Twitter multiples times during the week and to increase their comfort level. We have not truly dove into using this as an instructional tool – I did not feel they were ready. However, I do feel they have successfully started down the path to establishing their own PLN.

I’m not going to stop making them Twitter responses to me. One piece of “homework” I will be assigning them this week is to tweet their favorite moment from the first week of school. We will continue to hone in on these skills and produce viable, 21st century Tweachers.