Social Media Experiment: Day 4 – Integrating Ideas!

“Was initially worried about #20minwms impact on class time/flow, but it has been a big hit. Love it! Not disruptive at all.” ~ @valerieste

How great is that? @valerieste’s tweet summarizes the initial teacher concern and hesitation. Her tweet challenges us to try, to experiment rather than assume.

The two tweets above are from our young learners. In addition to working on retention (primacy-recency) we were hoping that we would find connections between our courses. Our young learners are noticing. Are we? It is worth repeating.

“Science and math are really related; curriculum bleed into each other” ~ @TaraWestminster

“I noticed that too, starting to see how twitter can be used as a tool, collaboration.” ~ @fencersz

As always, you can follow the conversation on Twitter using our hashtag, but here is a sample of what we are learning.

Imagine starting your school day as a 14-year-old to see a tweet from your principal that many of your classmates and teachers can read that says

“You are doing a great job contributing to #20minwms. Keep up the effort!”

Bravo to our principal, @boadams1. Bravo and brava to the faculty members participating in this experiment. Model learning for all!

Today, Friday, January 21, there were more than 53 tweets by at least 14 faculty and 5 students where 4 are from our junior high and one is from the high school. @swgough wants his high school learners to directly participate so that he can have documentation of the formative assessment to reflect on as he plans for the next lesson.

Our friend and colleague, @Deacs84, took the time to tweet from across the creek. It means a lot to many of our tweeters that she is watching, reading, and encouraging from afar.

We are experiencing a few problems and struggles. If you have problem-solving ideas, we would love to hear them.

Yesterday, we did not get any results when we searched on our #20minwms hashtag. This is problematic if you are looking for connections between classrooms, teachers, and learners. After several hours of communication with our fabulous IT department, we learned that ads were the cause of the problem. We have resolved this internally with great support from our IT guys. (Thanks, again.)
When we search on the #20minwms hashtag, some tweets with this hashtag do not appear. It seems to skip a tweet or two from time to time. This is very frustrating to the tweeter and to the data collector.
One adult-learner’s tweets using #20minwms have never appeared during the search. We have already changed her tweets from protected to not protected. We can see her tweets in our timeline, but they don’t appear when we search. It is frustrating. She wonders what she is doing wrong when she isn’t doing anything wrong. It is maddening.

This past week we have been tweeting responses to the question “What have you learned?” or the prompt “I have learned…” Next week those continuing to participate will be asked to tweet answer to “My question is …” or “I still need…”

We have had more faculty discussing Dr. Sousa’s research about retention and primacy-recency. A few more have read the research. My goals for this week:

Our #20minwms team will grow in number, in confidence, and in learning.
There will be more pictures and less “eggs” (the default Twitter gravatar).
More of our tweeters will understand the language of twitter.
- Specifically, more understanding of @, #, RT, HT as well as when/why to use them.
More of our colleagues will read the article from Dr. Sousa to be more informed about why we are trying this experiment.
Formative assessment of learning in a non-graded setting will impact classroom activities, planning, communication, confidence, and learning.
We want to have more tweets from our current team as well as tweets from others.
I want @bcgymdad and @joeschmo81 to tweet or to know that @DownSouth300 is ahead of them. (Yes, according to the data collection, @DownSouth300 is much more “with it” than these two!)

Remember @boadams1’s tweet from the ropes course on Thursday: