Many of the educators who stop by the blog here also use Twitter to help build and maintain their PLN. Some dedicate their time to state chats like #txeduchat, #ILedchat, or #norcalchat. [If you don't know whether your state has an edchat running you can check Joe Mazza's (@Joe_Mazza) Official State Hashtag Map or Jerry Blumgarten's (@cybraryman1) Weekly Twitter Chat schedule]. Other educators devotedly follow chats where their particular subject matter is discussed like #APlitchat or #alg1chat. Still others tune in to chat about the specific population of students with whom they work - #LDchat or #gtchat.
Many of you, however, have not yet turned on to one of the greatest ideas in Twitter professional development since the very creation of the hashtag. Of course, I'm talking about #slowchatED. If you still haven't added this column to your Tweetdeck or popped that hashtag into your search box, you're missing out on one of the most intense but relaxed chats available to us. But don't worry. As #slowchatED's illustrious founder, David Theriault (@davidtedu), would probably suggest, now is the time to FIX IT.
I'll give you the gist here, but then I'll link you to the genesis, history, and NOW of the thing. Basically, we chat all week long instead for only an hour. Every #slowchatED begins on Monday morning of a given week and ends on Saturday. Depending on who's moderating, you get one or two questions each day, and we spend the whole day hashing those questions out.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of #slowchatED (although not one of which I've availed myself as often as I'd like) is that, given that kind of time, if you have more than 140 characters to add, you can shoot over to your blog, pound out everything you've got to say, then just tweet a link to your thoughts into the stream. Between occasions like these and the various backchannels that grow like ivy, the discussion becomes much more robust than it ever could in just an hour's time.
Another big advantage, of course, is time. Ever have one of those days where you have conferences through your down time, classess running full tilt all day, meeting(s) after school, a quick bite to eat somewhere, then something with the family that takes you right up 'til bedtime? Oh, yeah, that's most days. Well with #slowchatED, you can take a whole day off. Shoot, take two. We'll still be there, hashing out the topic, whenever you can get back. You can even go back and answer the questions you missed. We just want as many intelligent voices in the conversation as possible.
So, if you've been lurking in the #slowchatED house during these last couple of months or just seeing your Tweeps' additions to the conversations drift through your feed, wait no longer. Now is the time. Here are the promised links if you need to know more. When you get done reading, jump in. Join us.
Because sometimes slow is better.
