Monday, May 16, 2016
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Top Tips: Hosting a #TeachAgChat, by Curriculum for Agricultural Science Education (CASE)
Future #TeachAgChat Hosts:
CASE enjoyed hosting the #TeachAgChat on Using Inquiry-Based Learning to Elevate Learning in Your Classroom on April 21, 2016. We appreciated the wonderful conversations throughout the one-hour live event and were amazed by the total number of contributors! According to our hashtag review data, there were 95 tweeters who created over 500 original tweets! When we added up the replies and retweets, there were over 800 total tweets! The #TeachAgChat total reach was over 28,000! We were stunned at the involvement and enjoyed hosting the #TeachAgChat.
Tips for Future Hosts:
- Promote, Promote, Promote!
- We used social media as the main way to tell people about the #TeachAgChat. We also shared the information about the chat in the Monday Morning Monitor and over US Agricultural Education and AAAE listservs. This is a great way to reach people who are interested about your topic, but may not follow on social media.
- Be Visual
- People like easy to read, quick information with images. There are a lot of “how-to” design types of resources online. Canva is a great website to create visual announcements, infographics, and social media images by using templates. It’s free!
- Put people in a room together!
- We hosted our twitter event during CASE Lead Teacher Orientation in Minneapolis. It was amazing to see people working together to create tweets. It elevated the energy in the room. Once they saw their tweets on TweetDeck, it encouraged them to participate more! We also provided a “how-to” participate guide for people who may not be as familiar with Twitter and/or TweetDeck to learn how to participate.
A few things we reflected upon after the #TeachAgChat:
- We participated and watched #TeachAgChats prior to hosting the CASE chat to see what was working well. One thing we would like to improve upon for next year is using a hashtag reviewing website throughout the time we promoted the Twitter Chat event. This would help us see our promotion reach before the event.
- We used Storify as a way to share the #TeachAgChat in review. It is a great way to share every tweet from the chat, some of which may have been missed by participants during the live Twitter event.
- Get familiar with the hashtag impact data website you plan to use before the chat. Some sites have time constraints that can affect your results. Keyhole.co, Hashtracking.com and Hashtagify.me are three good sites to check out before your #TeachAgChat!
We really enjoyed participating in the #TeachAgChat! Good luck to future #TeachAgChat hosts and participants!
Thursday, May 5, 2016
April 21st - Using Inquiry-Based Learning to Elevate Learning in Your Classroom w/ @Case4Learning
Host:
Curriculum for Agricultural Science Education (@case4learning)
Topic:
Using Inquiry-Based Learning to Elevate Learning in Your ClassroomStorify Archive:
Questions:
April 7th - Experiential Learning; Hosted by Iowa State AEE
Host:
Iowa State University 450 Farm Class (@ISUAg450Farm)OP McCubbins (@opmcubbins)
Topic:
Application of Experiential LearningStorify Archive:
https://storify.com/RCMcLean/teachagchat-engaging-in-experiential-learning?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=email&utm_medium=emailQuestions:
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
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.
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.
Friday, April 1, 2016
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
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Top Tips: What we learned from hosting by the Idaho FFA Association
The Idaho FFA Association hosted the #TeachAgChat on Thursday, March 10 and we'd love to share a few tips:
#1- Use the manual created by Dr. Foster and his students! We followed the "to-do" list in the manual in preparation for the chat. We utilized Canva- one of the sites suggested in the manual, to create a promotional graphic with the questions.
#2- Speaking of graphics, after analyzing Twitter data on posts with and without a graphic, we can difinitively say that the tweet with a graphic reached many more people. Our first tweet, posted March 5 without a graphic, made 492 impressions and had 13 total engagements. The next day, we posted a very similar tweet but added the graphic. This tweet made 7,974 impressions and had 360 total engagements. Graphics work!
#3- Send personal invites to colleagues, related Twitter accounts, and other organizations. In our case, we tagged all the state FFA associations we could find on Twitter in invitation tweets. We also sent direct messages to National FFA staff members involved in service learning. We also used our state ag teacher listserv and the national ag teacher listserv to promote, promote, promote.
#4- Don't try to tweet from two different Twitter accounts! Jaysa Fillmore, Idaho FFA Service Development Coordinator, was trying to participate from her personal account, @MrsAgTeacher, and the @IdahoFFA account. It would be been much easier to schedule responses to the questions from one account and then use the other live. It was also helpful to use Tweetdeck during the chat.
We were excited to claim the title of the first state FFA association to host a #TeachAgChat and would encourage other states to jump on board! Dr. Foster and his #TeachAg crew have done a great job creating this awesome resource for ag teachers- past, present, and future! Thanks for the opportunity!
#1- Use the manual created by Dr. Foster and his students! We followed the "to-do" list in the manual in preparation for the chat. We utilized Canva- one of the sites suggested in the manual, to create a promotional graphic with the questions.
#2- Speaking of graphics, after analyzing Twitter data on posts with and without a graphic, we can difinitively say that the tweet with a graphic reached many more people. Our first tweet, posted March 5 without a graphic, made 492 impressions and had 13 total engagements. The next day, we posted a very similar tweet but added the graphic. This tweet made 7,974 impressions and had 360 total engagements. Graphics work!
#3- Send personal invites to colleagues, related Twitter accounts, and other organizations. In our case, we tagged all the state FFA associations we could find on Twitter in invitation tweets. We also sent direct messages to National FFA staff members involved in service learning. We also used our state ag teacher listserv and the national ag teacher listserv to promote, promote, promote.
#4- Don't try to tweet from two different Twitter accounts! Jaysa Fillmore, Idaho FFA Service Development Coordinator, was trying to participate from her personal account, @MrsAgTeacher, and the @IdahoFFA account. It would be been much easier to schedule responses to the questions from one account and then use the other live. It was also helpful to use Tweetdeck during the chat.
We were excited to claim the title of the first state FFA association to host a #TeachAgChat and would encourage other states to jump on board! Dr. Foster and his #TeachAg crew have done a great job creating this awesome resource for ag teachers- past, present, and future! Thanks for the opportunity!
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