Yesterday, I held a tweetup at a local coffee shop to teach teachers about Twitter using…paper! The idea was to give teachers, of varying tech levels, a concrete way to learn the ins and outs of Twitter before actually jumping in with the technology. I wanted teachers to really understand the social nature of Twitter before worrying about the technical aspects.
It was a huge success! Our biggest problem of the day was the noise of ice being crushed for smoothies, if you have ever run a tech training this is pretty small bananas!
You can read (and watch) about how I planned for this Tweetup here. As teachers arrived, I handed them a paper Twitter packet. In the packet they found a half sheet screen shot of a Twitter wall with explanation call outs of important features, a name tag with their @ Twitter name, a password card for their classroom twitter account, an envelope with “DM” printed on the front, a stack of sticky notes with their Twitter handle on it, and a pen. I created a paper Twitter wall using that huge sticky note chart paper and stuck it to the wall of the coffee shop. After explaining how paper tweeting would work and giving them a run down of some of the Twitter lingo (wall, follow, DM, hash tag, RT, @ reply), I let them start “tweeting”. #edchat was going on at the same time. I knew that these teachers wouldn’t be ready to jump into that conversation online in their first venture out into the Twitter world, so I took the conversation to them in our paper tweeting. I gave the teachers the same topic and invited them to paper tweet responses. They wrote out a response and stuck it to one of the paper Twitter walls. I read the tweets out loud as they came in so that the teachers could write some @ replies. Everyone seemed to love passing private notes back and forth using the DM envelopes.
It was a fun time of socializing and I think everyone grasped the power of Twitter as a communication tool. At the end of the session I let them login to their actual Twitter accounts and practice sending a few tweets. This worked out really well because they already had lists to follow that I created for them and all of their accounts are already following each other. They had a built-in PLN to work with as soon as they logged on. This helped a lot! Today teachers will be taking Twitter into their classrooms and using it with students.
Result of the paper tweetup: success!
What a wonderful activity! I read your post on the prep and was so eager to see the results. This is such a creative way to engage folks in social media.
Now…if I only had a coffee shop nearby….hmmmm.
You are a genius! I am so stealing this! Will be sure to give you all credit. Congrats on a successful workshop.
I love all the teachers sitting around with their Macs! Great ideas 🙂
This is an awesome idea! I want to do this for my teachers…
Fabulous! Thanks so much for sharing!!
Thanks Julie and you are welcome 🙂
Thanks James, if you do let us know how it goes!
Gotta love the Macs!
Please do steal it, then come back and tell us how it went!
Hmmm, how about a pub? That could be fun too 🙂
I just wanted to say I think this is one of the best tech-themed PD sessions I have ever heard of. I love the idea of the physical interaction and I will probably use this at some point in the future. Thanks so much for sharing in such detail.
Wow! What a great idea. I think this probably got a lot more buy in from teachers than just jumping in with both feet.
I read your blog post about how you organized this session so I was curious how it was going to go. So glad to hear that it went well. In the near future I will probably be doing an introductory session with teachers about developing a PLN via Twitter and was struggling with the format. I think your plan is super and I hope to try something similar with my group. Thanks so much for sharing 🙂
Good morning from North Texas!!!
Yesterday, I worked with district level administrators setting up Twitter accounts – many jumped right in, but this idea would have been a beautiful introduction for those that were afraid to put themselves out there! Thank you for sharing and I’d love your permission to use with others!!!!
Lee, yes please use this with others!
Wow,
What an impressive way to teach twitter. I’ve not seen such a simple and eloquent way to explain it. I’m thinking that I might try this with family and friends.
Mark (@lovabletechguy)
This is such a creative idea.
I would have tried to jump in with the technology straight away, and probably generated a lot of frustration in the process. It was a genius idea to do a ‘virtual’ tweetup using paper – and the results showed that teachers ‘got it’ and were excited about learning how to use Twitter.
Well done!
I love this kinesthetic/tactile way to introduce teachers to the abstractness of Twitter and I can’t wait to try it with the teachers I work with (giving you ALL the credit of course). You mentioned that you gave them their Twitter name and already had an account set up for them with people to follow. How did you manage that and how did you select people for them to follow? Thanks so much for the ideas.
Ok, ignore my question about the account creation – just watched your video. 🙂
😀 Great, glad I answered it in there!
Thank you Peter. I have done that in the past…it leads to LOTS of stressed teachers. Thought I would try a new approach this time!
Let us know if you do Mark, would love to hear how it works with others!
This is fantastic. Our school is full of teachers who are fearful of using social networking sites like Twitter. This is will be an easy way to introduce them and show how easy and useful it can be in the classroom. Great!!!
Love. Love. Love.
Will add to this to the “stuff I do that you’ve shown us b/c you’re amazing”…
Sigh. You seriously? are awesome.
Thank you Amber, you made my day!
Best of luck with it Trina!