Twitterchat: Q&A within 128 words

       I joined a Twitterchat with the hashtag #Edtechchat. When I entered the chat room, many people were already started talking. Some of the members were new to this chat room just like me, and they tweeted a brief introduction of them.

       Before I joined his group, I thought they talked the specific techniques about applying technology in the classroom or something very academic. But later, I found that their first question of the day was about the bad weather and school. I felt a little surprised and breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t feel nervous anymore because I could say something about this topic. I studied in Buffalo where the cold weather was everyday’s fare and snowing was routine.

       However, a problem came up. The limitation of each tweet was 128 characters, which was apparently long enough for my reply. So I had to reorganize my sentence and chose shorter words instead. At first, I thought this was a little bit annoying. Why should there be a restriction on the letters? But a few seconds later, I told myself that maybe the reason why it named “tweet”, a short, high sound. And I think I could express myself clearly in short words. To be honest, it was interesting when you have to struggling with the words. Maybe I will use “words limitation” in my teaching for some writing tasks or word games. Furthermore, Twitterchat  is a good place for quick ask and quick answer. May be I could use it as a sample to make a similar Q&A responses board for my students to let them ask and answer the questions of what they have learned. And that is also convenient for me to monitor my students’ study.

       All in all, Twitterchat offers me a platform to communicate with other people who have the same or even more knowledge than me. I can always learn new things from them, and the internet tools can always bring me ideas to apply in real classroom.