I’m often asked about using Twitter.  I almost always say that I use Twitter to take notes when I’m at conferences.  I use Twitter to crowd-source my notes.  To some, it seems complex and complicated.  To me, it is comforting to know that others are picking up ideas that I may miss while I’m thinking.

This week, Tony Wagner and Madeline Levin spoke in Atlanta.  A collaborative effort between The Walker School, The Lovett School, The Westminster Schools, and Trinity School brought these two speakers to Atlanta.  At Trinity, we asked our faculty to attend one of the two talks.

The screen shot below shows the start of the Twitter notes shared at Tony Wagner’s 4:00 talk at Lovett.  Important to note, there were many tweets at Wagner’s talk.  I captured ones using the hash tag #Wagner.

I usually use Storify to capture tweets from conferences to have notes from my learning experiences.

On a whim, I sent the following email to our community the next morning.

The response was, well, shocking.  I received 5 email messages thanking me for the notes and another dozen face-to-face thank you’s and questions.  Here are some of the comments I received in writing.

Love it! Another great example of technology embedded PD.

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I LOVED Tony Wagner’s session. I’ve got my husband on baby-duty for one more day so I can go tonight as well!

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Thanks for this email!  Hopefully we’ll see even more tweeting tonight…

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Thanks for sharing this.  I am sorry that I was here deep in the details but glad to have been able to read everyone’s comments….

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Thanks for sharing!  I did not take notes but wished I had!

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First of all, thank you for encouraging Twitter.  I actually looked at it last night to see what the conversation was during the talk.

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The response was so positive that I was motivated to tweet during Madeline Levine’s talk and Storify the notes.  As I was sitting in the auditorium waiting for the talk to begin, Michelle Perry came to check with me about the hash tag #Levine that I sent in my email. She noticed that the #Levine hash tag was all about Adam Levine.  Awesome! Michelle is not a seasoned user of Twitter.  She noticed something that I failed to check.  We quickly checked #MLevine and made this correction prior to the talk. I love that she was so proactive about her understanding and our learning.

After the talk, I created the Madeline Levine – Atlanta – 2013 Storify shown and linked below.

I sent the following email to our community to share our notes.

I was so pleased with myself about completing this task before I left to go home.  Dr. Levine spoke to parents at Trinity at 7:00.  My hypothesis was that the Storify could “go to press” because parents wouldn’t tweet.  I failed to consider that the administrators in the evening session would tweet.  So, I felt compelled to Storify and email one more time.

Again, I received several thank you’s and lots of questions about the notes, sharing what was learned, and the power of Twitter.

Even if a teacher-learner only contributed one tweet to the stream of #Wagner or #MLevine, they participated in the crowd-sourcing of notes for the learners in the room, the learners reading on Twitter, and the learners using the notes to stay connected.

How do we create more reasons to learn, to share, to investigate, to risk, and to grow?