Twitter Chats

One of our course activities will be joining students from another university in online discussions of topics related to diversity, which is a cross-cutting theme that we address in all education courses.*

We will be using Twitter as the online "place" to hold these discussions, participating in at least two Twitter chats with the students enrolled in EDUC 489: Teaching Students of Diverse Backgrounds, a course being taught at North Dakota State University in Fargo. This will occur twice in the semester:

Thursday, February 18, 6:30-7:00 P.M. (Mountain)
Tuesday, April 5, 6:00-6:30 P.M. (Mountain)

* Another cross-cutting theme addressed in all education courses is technology. Our Twitter chats will enable us to address both themes with one project!

Step 1

Create a Twitter account.

Here are step-by-step instructions from Twitter's Help Center.

To the right is a brief video tutorial demonstrating the steps in the process.

Once you have an account set up, please share your Twitter username by posting it to the Schoology discussion board titled "Twitter Chats."

Step 2

Familiarize yourself with Twitter chats.

You can participate in a Twitter chat right from within your Twitter account.

However, Twitter chats have become so popular that a number of tools have been developed expressly for the purpose of making it easier to participate in Twitter chats. Two commonly used tools are TweetDeck and TweetChat.

To the right is a brief tutorial demonstrating how to take part in a Twitter chat in two different ways:

by logging in to Twitter and chatting from there
by logging in to TweetDeck and chatting from there

You might wish to check out TweetChat, too, or search online for other Twitter chat tools that you might like better (there are several options). Decide what tool you will use for our Twitter chats, even if you'd prefer just to use Twitter itself.

Here are step-by-step instructions from Twitter's Help Center on how to use TweetDeck.

Step 3

Join the Twitter chat.

See the document to the right for the guidelines for participating in our Twitter chats with our colleagues at NDSU.

Note how we will indicate which questions (posted throughout the Twitter chat) we are responding to when we write our own comments.

Also note the hashtags that we must include in every post that we make during the Twitter chat: #EDUC489 and #BisonHawks2016. That's how we all will "follow" the same stream of comments that will constitute the Twitter chat.

With that information, you will be able to log in to Twitter (or TweetDeck, TweetChat, or another Twitter chat tool) shortly before the time that one of our Twitter chats is scheduled to begin . . . and then start participating!

The document to the right includes the readings for the February 18 Twitter chat.

Here are the readings for the April 5 Twitter chat. Three of them you should read before logging in for the chat:

"The Importance of Providing Books in High Poverty Classrooms" (2015)
"Poverty in YA Literature" (2015)
"What Terrifies Teens in Today's Young Adult Novels? The Economy" (2013)

And three of them you can refer to during the chat as you find references being made to any of these articles:

"What Poverty Does to Kids' Brains" (2015)
"What Poverty Does to Your Brain" (2015)
"Hungry Kids: The Solvable Crisis" (2013)

Please click the "Full Screen" button in the lower right corner of the document to launch a full-sized version. (You may need to use the scroll bar to move to the right side of the document.)

How to Use Twitter as a Professional Education Tool (2016)
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File Type:	pdf

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Check out this handout from some of the NDSU students who presented at the ND Association of Colleges for Teacher Education spring conference in Minot on April 8.

If you'll look closely, you'll see that our class has been included somewhere in the handout . . .