There is a huge amount of innovation going on in Scottish schools, I am looking forward to attending an event where I can put a face to some names and meet the people I consider part of my learning network.

I will be at the SLF on Wednesday and Thursday attending a few seminars – I am particularly interested in meeting Ollie Bray and Derek Robertson to talk Nintendo DSs in the classroom. We are on the verge of beginning our own DS adventure in our Year 4 classes so I hope to glean some more ideas.

If you are attending the SLF or TeachMeet please let me know, it will be great to join up the dots and meet you. Anyone up for coffee in Glasgow Wednesday morning as I will be getting in pretty early?

That number, the followers/following count, may only be a simple number on the profile but for me it means a great deal. That number represents part of my learning network and I value every connection that is there. I suppose the saying “You never fully appreciate what you have got until it is gone” applies here. The lost connections really troubled me.

Each person involved with education who added me to their network I thanked for doing so and I said hi. I checked out who they were and what they were blogging/tweeting about. I found out their real names when I could. I subscribed to some of their blogs. I spoke with them about where they taught and what edtech they were interested in. More importantly I began to learn from them, their perspectives and their thoughts, their classroom practice and projects, their links and conversations.

I value their connection.

When 300 connections were lost it felt like someone had unpicked all of my our hard work. In the last 24 hours I have realised more fully what my Twitter network means to me professionally. It is only part of my PLN but it has a unique position, in the sense that it is close to being a live network. I don’t get the same number of people connecting with me via Skype, my blog or email – Twitter holds the majority. Nothing comes close to allowing me to connect with other teachers across the globe.

Is my network part of who I am as a teacher now? Definitely – and so I value every facet of it.

The majority of those 300 have returned as I write and it seems that perhaps the others will too – but I am currently 70 shy of what my Twitter network looked like yesterday morning, and that still bothers me.

“Dear Twitter try and fix the rest of the problem soon and remember you hold some of our precious professional networks in your hands. Please look after them.”

Image: ‘Regret‘

I had planned to do 2 sessions with our two Year 5 (9/10 yr olds) classes on the usual introduction to Google Earth type content but it all changed. Sometimes things just happen and I love those sort of sessions – the unknown, the edgy, the challenging sessions that we all learn more from than sticking to the usual, grey sessions we could do with our eyes closed. Pushing the boundaries a little.

Needless to say Twitter and Google Earth were involved, and the latter is not a particularly new tool – but the combination of both created very powerful real time discovery. A few moments before the children came in from lunch, I asked my network to challenge the children to find them in Google Earth, to search and discover their location from a few scraps of info via Twitter. Well the challenges rolled in and in a couple of hours we had 25 different people to track down.

Of course we got stuck in straight away and I sent the first class off trying to find the locations of our helpful teacher GeoTweets! Then it occurred to me that we had to reply in some way and prove that we had found them, so once we had identified where they were we Tweeted them a message with the proof. Here is an example:

Not much there but we did a quick look at technolibrary’s Twitter profile and soon found her location on her blog. Off the kids went trying to track down her school. The imagery was excellent and we could even read the words on their football pitch! Of course hidden under all of this excitement is children using the search and layers tools to refine what they are looking at – some of them using GE for the first time.

Here is the Tweet I sent to prove we were there…

and

The children’s efforts were driven by a real purpose and I always think that such a context around any edtech helps to push it to one side and we focus on the learning going on – not just the tool. Of course we had some trouble finding Clay Burell :-0

As you can imagine we had lots of fun exploring the world and the real time challenges from real people – that is the power of bringing Twitter into the classroom. I repeated the session with another class and just refreshed the request for challenges in the break. It worked out to be a wonderful intro to Google Earth which would also work really well with adult learners or during a professional development course.

Towards the end of the sessions we found Chris Lehmann and the Science Leadership Academy. The kids found it fascinating as we looked at the 3D buildings layer and what more GE had to offer.

Here is a quick summary of how you could use this concept in your classroom:

• Ask your Twitter network for challenges, GeoTweets if you will. Do this in advance of the session to give people time to respond.
• Guide the children quietly – you want them to be explorers not tourists!
• Encourage the children to found out about the area of the GeoTweet – find proof – we found the name of the local garage for one!
• Tweet back the proof to the sender to say you have found them. Maybe ask a further question about the area.
• We used my own Twitter network as I wanted the children to focus on using and exploring Google Earth.
• If you think your network isn’t quite at that tipping point where it will give live results, then you can prep it before hand and ask for specific responses a couple of days before. Ask others to pass on the request to their network – spread the word a bit.
• Some children will not find some of the locations because of the inaccuracy of their search. Encourage them to check and retype.
• Display the GeoTweets on a separate board or in a different application because Twitter’s timeline shifts everything down. You could use the screen capture tool in SMART Notebook (or other IWB app) to pin up current searches.
• Get different groups of children searching for different people – to spread the work.
• Be flexible and relax – this is a live session and is in the hands of your network, go with the flow of it. You have invited your network to contribute something so be prepared for the change of pace. You may have to wait, be patient – also you may have to juggle lots of GeoTweets.
• Remember to explain what Twitter is to your kids! Explain about the connections it cultivates, you may be surprised by their reaction.
• Have fun!

A big thankyou to the 25 odd people who jumped in with their challenges for my classes we had a great afternoon of GeoTweeting fun!

In my opinion if you can better understand these tools you will be able to use them much more effectively. It turns out that in fact if you are a Twitter user, you are part of two quite distinct networks. Listening and Talking.

Affectionately known as “lurking” you may follow many people and listen to their updates, their conversations, their thoughts. I have called this the “Listening” network. There is much to offer in this passive part of the Twitter network – follow the people you are interested in and you may pick up on little gems you may be able to use. But it has it’s disadvantages. The “Listening” network is based upon a passive interaction. You as a teacher are tuning in but cannot steer the conversation so long as you remain lurking.

As soon as you engage with someone in this “Listening” network things begin to change and the two network models above begin to merge and blur together.

The active part of your Twitter network is clearly this “Talking” element and, for me anyway, this is where I gain the most professionally. I may stumble upon a conversation thread and follow along, lurk if you will, to the point where I gain something for myself. But my most useful Twitter experiences occur when I actively engage my network either with a request or question.

So get out there and engage your network!

Whether you are a lurker, listener or talker it does not matter, as long as we continue to push these tools to affect change in our own professional sphere.

Before I begin I want to set a clear frame of reference for what I refer to as the Twitter network. I will be referring to the supportive edtech environment it has created and is used by hundreds of teachers. The network that helps you to solve a Mac iPod problem or alike. I am not referring to the day to day trivia or more personal aspects of this form of communication.

My Analogy

This is very simple and I hope that it allows you to understand the basic issue that faces many new users of Twitter, and indeed turns people away from it.

I hope that I never have to ask the question:”Is there a doctor on board?” but if I had to I would prefer to ask the question over the tannoy on an Airbus A380 then a small helicopter. With 839 passengers hearing my question I clearly have a higher probability that someone is indeed a doctor! I know that my chances are pretty poor when I turn to the other 3 passengers of the chopper and say “Doctor?”. But, and here is where the analogy changes slightly, bear with me, imagine that you went to the tannoy or stood up on that flying bus and asked the same question but no one even heard you utter a word. In fact you have a legitimate need and you imagine someone can help, and yet nobody can hear your request. The only option for you is to listen intently to everyone’s conversation in the hope that they maybe mention something about your problem.

This, in part, explains the frustrations for new users to Twitter.

The New User Experience

Joining Twitter as a teacher, generally speaking, intrinsically means that you want to connect, collaborate and tap into the wider community’s expertise to help and support your learning. However it often takes time for the value in a Twitter network to be revealed. If a new user is not “followed” by many people than their voice is not heard, their questions go unanswered, they echo into an empty space. This is not what Twitter is about? Do we need to show new users the way it works? It would be great to see a movie of someone using Twitter to get an immediate response, receiving an answer to a question etc. This would prove the concept so clearly to a new user, maybe we need to model it.

I have begun to see much more of this modelling behaviour. I do not think that Twitter is a resource that can be explained if detached from the network itself ie. away from a computer that is online. You may refer a colleague to this great networking tool and they perhaps take a look on their own later that day but, not surprisingly, they will wonder what all the fuss is about. I demonstrated Twitter to a friend last weekend and after 5 or 6 quick responses from around the world, realised the value of the “Say hi to…” tweet (a Twitter message). It is quite an innocuous thing to do but modelling how the network actually functions, much like a great deal of learning, leaves a much more indelible image on a new user.

Building your Network

Everyone starts from the same place when using Twitter but the day to day experiences have a varying success, depending on the number of followers you have. It is a simple equation, that is, if you have accumulated 100’s of followers over the course of a considerable time using Twitter the chances are when you ask for advice / help / contributions – many more are forthcoming. This successful, positive experience breeds more commitment to the network tool. You see great value and consider using it more / more often.

The flip side of this is that a newbie may have to wait until their network is large and eclectic enough to reap the immediate rewards of Twitter. Perhaps it is these new users that need a broad, wide reaching network from the word go. They (and I am referring to teachers curious of the benefits of such a tool) need to have success pretty early on and see the link with their own practice and how it can make a contribution. Otherwise they may turn away and see no value.

I think the importance of “I follow you – you follow me” behaviour cannot be underestimated, we need to help each other build a supportive collaborative network.

Tipping Point

Since I began writing this post (its been a slow one!) my own Twitter experiences have changed. I went through the period of use when my network was growing, when between 20-30 people were listening to your updates but you would get little or no interaction or replies. I am currently on 101 followers and I think that my first real successful interactions with the Twitter network took place between 80-100 people following my updates. These two experiences combined have been my tipping point – after which I knew that this tool is very important to my day to day work.

On a Thursday morning my teaching partner and I normally get some PPA time and 2 weeks ago we were sat talking about the following week’s planning. I was exploring the use of magazines in literacy linked with PSHE. I asked on the Twitter network:

> Anyone know of good examples of school magazines or newspapers produced by the kids?

Two replies came back immediately…

> @tombarrett there is a case study on the BBC newsround site http://tinyurl.com/28l5hx

> @tombarrett – Have a look at http://www.edu.fi/magazinef…

All of this occurred within the immediate time I was planning, allowing me to take it into consideration. Twitter has impacted on my planning processes.

The second positive experience I had was just this week. My Twitter PLN had grown to close to hundred followers by this point and this particular example has to be the most successful use of the network so far. After a successful meeting regarding the school laptop project I decided to author some possible questions for a pupil survey. However I just had a blank – I managed one but needed some inspiration. So I asked…

> Aaargh – I am writing our pupil laptop survey but hitting a brick wall, need some inspiration. 8 ltops per class 9-11yrs any ideas for q’s?

The responses were fantastic and really helped to shape the survey:

>where have they used the laptop? is it easy to carry? what action have they had to take to make sure its not damaged?

>Don’t know much about your program but here’s a question: What do u do on the laptop when ur not being told what to do?

>’Has using a laptop with a partner changed how they collaborate?’ ‘If so, how?’

>’given the choice, what would they still rather use paper/pens for?’

>Which was most fun / useful? Anything else they’d like to use? Best thing / Worst thing? Biggest benefit of having laptops?

>what about any software they would have liked on? frustrations, such as speed and connectivity to school network?

>Pupil survey Question: If u had to write a blog about using a laptop in school, what would the name of your blog be?

>three ways in which they have used it in subjects? what restrictions they have had?

As you can see the suggested questions are both insightful and creative – and they proved invaluable in authoring the survey. But the Twitter interaction was not finished there, as I created a Google Doc for the questions, shared the link and asked for comments about the drafted questions. Again the feedback was very helpful and contributed to a further edit of the survey. I am very grateful to those who helped.

Again it all comes down to numbers – if you have a large enough network with the right people in it who are willing to share, contribute, advise and help – then you will get experiences like this. Be patient and let your network grow – don’t expect too much from it early on. Nurture it and encourage it to broaden by following other classroom practitioners.

What does it all mean for classteachers and schools?

In my opinion building your own PLN is vital in the current edtech climate. I learn so much from being involved with people like YOU, reading this post, your comments and contributions help to shape my practice in class. Furthermore tools such as Twitter not only help make connections easier, but allow individuals to tap into the collective wisdom of many.

I would advise if you are a classteacher, like me, to take a look at Twitter – and if you can get someone to show you then all the better. But it is a long road and you need patience to build your network up. At the beginning of this post I was thinking of changing the Twitter model – to make it easier for newcomers to realise the potential, (I still think that this is important) to bypass the frustrations and shortcut into a bigger network, but perhaps a true networking journey in itself is more insightful and enjoyable.

Building any network takes time and I think that it is time well spent.

As I have been writing this final paragraph I saw this Tweet:

http://twitter.com/room24 This is cool experiment. 4th grade teacher letting students tweet on class account. embedded in his blog.

This would be a nice way into blogging in such a micro form and would facilitate further writing on a class blog. In effect the children microblog and connect directly with a class network.