Top Tips: ISU 450 Lessons Learned from Hosting

What we learned from hosting #TeachAgChat - ISU 450 Farm Students

On Thursday April 7th the Iowa State Ag 450 Farm PR committee hosted a #TeachAgChat focused on Experiential Learning in the classroom. We had a great time hosting and got to hear from many other Ag teachers and experts in the field.

How the chat went and what we learned:

1. We consulted with two individuals known for their work in the area of Experiential Learning. Both confirmed that they would assist us during the actual chat, however, only one individual actively participated. What we learned: it is very important to include experts in #TeachAgChat to help provide 'expert' advice to questions we may not have answers for. It is important to be in constant contact with your identified experts. However, as with life, stuff happens! We think it was a successful chat!

2. Getting the word out to our followers on Twitter and Facebook is important to having many different types of ideas and replies during the #TeachAgChat.  Actively advertising the event is helpful in gaining participants, and we could have done a better job making frequent advertisements, but overall, the event went well.

3. Because the topic we chose was more applicable to Ag educators, we had a tough time answering a few of the questions.  However, we had a unique perspective to use when responding to some of the other participants' answers.  It was also interesting to learn about the theory that goes into planning these activities.

This session of the #TeachAgChat went pretty well despite the low number of participants.  We look forward to participating in future #TeachAgChats and learning about information that will be relevant to our future careers.

Top Tips: Advancing Your Professional Development as a Teacher Candidate #TeachAgChat

What a great discussion we had on 3/24 about advancing preservice teachers through professional development opportunities!

We absolutely LOVED hosting the #TeachAgChat and hope to participate and even host again in the future! With that in mind, there were several things that we learned by hosting this chat that we hope you can find useful as you host yours.

• We asked specific preservice teachers to participate in the chat and they confirmed, however, they did not participate. We aren’t sure if they forgot or just didn’t know how to respond, even though we sent them the questions well in advance. We thought that maybe next time we would have more back-up questions to help facilitate the discussion and make our participants feel more comfortable.
• Make sure to use a website like Hootsuite or TweetChat to follow the conversation. It makes the whole chat a lot more organized and helps you to keep track of who you have responded to.
• Pay close attention to the responses. The #TeachAgChat is a great learning tool for everyone involved. Make sure to have a follow-up plan for what you will do with the information you receive from the chat.

Overall, we count this #TeachAgChat as a success and look forward to using the information we received to help develop our programming. See you on the next chat! #agedu