Our Third All-School Twitter Chat

This past week, the teachers, students, and principal of LearnQuebec's online school had our third all-school twitter chat. Three is a magic number. Once you've done something three times, it starts to become a habit. You also start to notice trends, behaviours, what works best, and what doesn't. Most importantly, you get an idea of how it's evolving, if it's gaining traction, and we are all now convinced we are onto something!

A little background: 

Our classroom (students' names appear in chat area at
lower left, hidden here of course.)

• We're synchronous online classroom teachers. Our students are in brick and mortar schools all day but when it's time for Math, Science, Physics, or Chemistry, they get online with us. They are from all over Quebec, many in remote areas. We're all pretty used to interacting live online, in fact, we pretty much crave it due to the lack of f2f time.
• By "all-school", I mean all of our teachers, all of our students, and our principal.
• 3/5 of the teachers already use Twitter with their students, so most of them already had accounts and were comfortable using it.
• At the beginning of each year, we get permission from the parents of our students to be online in many sites - google drive, twitter, blogs, geogebratube....and the list just keeps growing every year. So that part was already taken care of.

• For non-Tweeters: A twitter chat is what happens when a bunch of people all get on Twitter at the same time to tweet at each other. It's like a party that happens online, except that you can actually have way more conversations with way more people at a twitter chat than you could ever manage at a party.

The story so far:

We started having these twitter chats in February of this year. Our purpose was to create a stronger sense of community amongst our online students, whom we almost never get to see face to face, and who almost never get to see each other. Here's a quick synopsis of the first two chats:

Chat 1: Feb. 5, 2014:  If you'd like to read all the details of this wonderful event, including the actual tweets that happened that night, I blogged all about it here. If you'd rather not read that whole chapter, allow me to summarize: It was great! We decided on 5 questions, the theme of which was online learning - the one thing that unites all of us. The participation rate was very encouraging - we had about 35% of them there, and by the end of the evening, there were about 700 tweets with the #lqchat hashtag. The staff were all so thrilled by the event that we spontaneously had a staff meeting immediately afterward to debrief! We were so blown away by how enthusiastic our students were about the opportunity to interact this way. It took a while to calm down! My takeaway was that every human needs to connect, regardless of age, academic interest, or what medium you use. Where there's a will, there's a way.

Chat 2: March 12, 2014:  Unfortunately, I didn't blog about this one, not because it wasn't great or important though! You can see the complete chat here, separated into questions. Summary: This time we used some of our students' suggestions for chat topics, like career plans. The theme was still online-based, but also looking to the future - theirs and ours. Once again, the staff met afterwards to take it all in together. Chats can be quite overwhelming. Not only is the sheer volume of tweets impossible to keep up with, but the stimulation generated by all the ideas and connections can be quite overpowering as well. We had about the same amount of participation, and we were once again thrilled by it all. As a side note, suddenly there was more tweeting happening on a daily basis from some of the more reluctant tweeters on our staff! My takeaway - sometimes to get from A to B you have to aim for C, and then unexpectedly end up at B on your way there.

Our latest chapter:

Chat 3: April 22, 2014: This time, we asked for the students ideas in a more concrete way. Peggy Drolet made a google spreadsheet for them in which to give their input. The staff met, and together came up with the questions, using as many of their suggestions as possible, while keeping it safe, appropriate, non-academic, and interesting. Unfortunately, as I write this, Storify is not fully cooperating, at the moment, in giving us the full set of tweets for all the questions, so I have had to take a few snips to give you an idea of the flavour of the responses.

Prechat:

Here the Storify for the prechat chatting that took place. As it happened, that night there was also a very important hockey game happening at the exact same time as our chat. This hockey game happened to involve the Montreal Canadians. Have I mentioned we are all Canadians? Living in Quebec? So, of course, we get a little excited about hockey. More than a few people were, um, multi-tasking during the chat! These happened before and during the chat:

And finally here are the actual chat questions, with a few of the answers:

Q1 What is the happiest/proudest you have ever been in your life?

Q2 What is the coolest thing about math/science?

Q3 What is your favorite pastime/hobby?

Q4 What tech tool is your favourite & why?

Q5 What about you would people find the most surprising?

Q6 What is something you are not learning presently in school that you want to learn?

This last question took an interesting turn toward the end:

A few other things that happened:

An idea for us all to do our own version of Pharrell's Happy video!

Lots of personalities, senses of humour revealed:

Our fabulous principal, as always, was there and supportive like a boss (get it? haha)

Finally, the day after the chat, we all asked our students to type their reactions on the eboard in class. I have taken snips of those and put them on this padlet wall, word for word. Yup, I really think we're onto something!

Learning How to Be

Wade Deer, one of my facebook friends, posted this status this week, and with his permission, I'm posting it here. I love it because of how it's written, what it says, and how it addresses so many issues that educators everywhere are dealing with. Here it is:

I remember when I was 18 years old with a baby on the way and I needed a job. That was when I first started to do carpentry with my Dad. How I hated it. I knew nothing,not how the nail,how to cut with a saw and no basic knowledge of what the hell I was doing. I dreaded waking up and going to work where I was nothing more the a extra pair of hands or worse in someone's way. With time and some patience from my father I slowly started to learn. I could hammer a nail. I learned how to read a tape. The more I learned,the less I dreaded getting up to go to work.I was no longer a helper,no longer in the way. I was making a real contribution at work. Now I sit here close to 20 years later with another new baby, I love my job. The key for me was to learn how to work. Once I did that my job became easier and now I can look at all the houses I had a hand in building and be proud of the work we had done. Not many people have the ability to physically see all their hard work as a finished product. All I have to do is take drive all around this town to see houses and projects that we have done,from my first house I ever worked on to the one we just finished months ago. I had a hand in making someone's HOME,just not a house. Now I sit here and think how I started out hating it,and now I am proud of the work I do. It may never make me rich,but I like to think I am good at my job,which is why I love doing what I do.

I'm not going to blather on about what it means for me the teacher or me the parent, suffice it to say that Wade's words stopped me in my tracks. This writing speaks for itself, but if I had to pick one favourite line, it's "The key for me was to learn how to work." This man didn't just learn how to be a carpenter, he learned how to be.

Thanks for posting this, Wade.

The Day My Brain Talked to Me, or How I Learned to Think Like a Logarithm

Honestly, what with my withering attention span and emotional ups and downs, it’s amazing that I manage to get anything done. But I do nevertheless, and this is what I managed to get done on the afternoon of this past Valentine’s Day. I needed to write about it because it was kind of awesome, and because it gave me some insight into my students' reflections in their eportfolios.

What happened is, I inadvertently went on a quest, in my head.  The journey itself was fascinating, at least in retrospect, because it seemed like a meta-cognitive experience. Since it's probably the kind of thing I'm supposed to be getting my kids to do and write about in their eportfolios, it's very fortunate that I did it myself, and apropos that I write about it too. And although they say that the journey is more important than the destination, it was pretty sweet when I got there.

What was the problem?

This little paragraph in our textbook that has tormented me for many years:

The rule of a logarithmic function can be written in the form f(x) = alogcb(x - h) + k. However, certain algebraic manipulations allow you to transform this rule and write it in the standard form f(x) = logcb(x - h).

To worsen the torment, I've said to my students "Right. Sorry. I don't know what those certain algebraic manipulations are, but it says here that they exist and they work, so let's just go with it, shall we?" And another little piece of my self-respect as a teacher snapped off.

Anyway, I had a ton of other things I was supposed to be doing, so naturally, I started playing with the expression to try to disappear the a and the k. I just kind of fell into it, just like that. Kind of like Frodo.

And so began the quest:

(There is math here, but I've tried to intersperse it with enough other stuff that anyone who's ever tried to figure something out might be able to identify with it.)

Anyway, the k part was easy, so I started with that. Easy, I just replaced the k:

At this point, I couldn't help but notice that that last term, in red, looked and sounded a lot like Louis CK, so I watched a few of his hilarious videos. Very productive.

(Approximately a half hour later): The whole reason I did that last step was in preparation for this next one, in which we...

Smoosh the logs::

Normal people would call this last step "applying the first property of logarithms" , or, "because the sum of the logs is the log of the product", but I and my students call this "smooshing the logs." (Sorry, former and current students, for using vocabulary that no one else recognizes or takes seriously. But you had fun, am I right?)

So far, I had managed to get rid of the k by combining it with the c and the b to form what's in red:

But that was very routine, baby stuff, nothing new. In fact, I'd gotten this far in previous years. The real rub was what to do with that darn "a". I was convinced that I could only get rid of it by applying another property in an equally routine and unoriginal way:

   

Normal people: Apply the third property of logarithms.

Me and my students: Actually, that's what we'd say. Sometimes I model normal behaviour to keep them guessing.

But the only thing I could think of to do next was this really lame exponent thing:

On Valentine's Day, for some reason, that (x - h) with the exponent of "a" sorely vexed me.

The Cycle of Distraction and Torment

I then began a cycle, which I repeated many times that afternoon,which went a little like this:

I'm afraid I became a bit crazed. I'm looking right now at all the papers I scribbled on furiously. Here's one of them: 

The Turning Point

It wasn't that I finally knuckled down, or suddenly discovered a new math thing, or gained insight from geogebra. The turning point came about when myself talked to myself. I literally heard my brain say to me "You're not thinking like a logarithm. Think like a logarithm. BE an exponent."

Then this actual logarithm idea kept popping up, something I remembered noticing a long time ago. An idea that wasn't terribly difficult, but it had been of my own making:

If I say that:

that is, they both equal 9, I'm really saying that the exponent that 3 needs to turn it into a 9 is the opposite of the exponent that 1/3 needs to turn it into a 9. In log language, that's:

 

Or more generally:

 

How to think like a logarithm:

Now this didn't solve my problem, but it gave me a hint about how I needed to think. Stop mindlessly applying routine algebraic procedures, and think about what a log is, how it behaves, and how logs with different bases can be related.

Now I saw "a" as a number multiplying an exponent, and I played around with this kind of thing:

but if I change my base to , or 3, and still want to get 729, then it's:

I'll spare you the details of my further number experiments, for there were many, and they were feverish, but the important thing is this:

At this point, there was nothing on this earth that could have distracted me.

Or even discouraged me. I was possessed. I still didn't know the answer, but I knew I was on the very verge of getting it, and now that I look back, this was the most exhilarating part. I owned the problem, and I knew in my bones that it was just a matter of time before I'd get it. I was actually shaking a bit.

I can count the number of times this has happened to me on the fingers of two hands. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be, after all, it was pretty exhausting! (The last time it happened, I wrote about it here. Projectiles. Enough said.)

Once I was sure of the numbers, I put it all down algebraically to summarize. It occurs to me that this is the most boring part, because it's like a synopsis of a story, rather than the actual story. And usually this is the part we show our students, the boring synopsis!

The math behind the "a", if you're interested:

, or, said as a log:



But then:



which means that



which, put logarithmically, is:



See above in red, by which I can replace n:

which told me I can get rid of the "a" by combining it with the c to form a new base, c ^(1/a).

After certain algebraic manipulations

 and much checking and re-checking with geogebra, this thing of beauty finally revealed itself to me:

which I immediately tweeted, and to which my wonderful brilliant friend Jennifer Silverman immediately replied::

@a_mcsquared You are SUCH a romantic, my dear!
— Jen Silverman (@jensilvermath) February 14, 2014

What happened then?

Well, I shared it with my students the following week, just so that I could have the satisfaction of NOT losing another little piece of my self-respect as a teacher for once. Their reactions could be summarized as "Do we need to know this?". But I also shared with them the journey that had lead to it, and I think that made way more of an impression. I hope what they'll remember is:

• No one can ever say they know all there is to know about something.
• You can never call anything you know useless, because you never know when you'll need it.
• Your brains are miracles, not because of the facts they can hold, although that is pretty amazing, but because it can solve problems while you're not even aware of it.
• You can actually influence how you think!
• Everything that I ask you to do I'll do too. Including and especially, keep learning.

Our First All-School Twitter Chat

....was this week! It was an idea that was hatched just a couple of weeks ago, and due to the enthusiasm of our principal, our staff, and our students, it happened, it was great, and it'll happen again soon.

A few facts about us that I hope WON'T make you say "Oh well, that's fine for you but it won't work for us" and then move on:

• We're online synchronous classroom teachers. Our students are in brick and mortar schools all day but when it's time for Math, Science, Physics, or Chemistry, they get online with us. They are from all over Quebec, many in remote areas. We're all pretty used to interacting live online, in fact, we pretty much crave it due to the lack of f2f time.
• By "all-school", I mean all of the teachers, all of the students, and our principal.
• 3/5 of the teachers already use Twitter with their students, so most of them already had accounts and were comfortable using it, although the chat was a first for almost everyone.
• At the beginning of each year, we get permission from our parents for our kids to be online in many sites - google drive, twitter, blogs, geogebratube....and the list just keeps growing every year. So that part was already taken care of.

Still here? Great!
Why we wanted to do this:

Cohesion. We're scattered all over the place, admin, teachers and students alike. This would be an opportunity to feel like we all belong to something, a school, an organizations, a community. It's something that you take for granted in the brick and mortar school. We also thought it would be great for the kids to meet other online students - they typically only know those in their own class.

How it all unfolded:

Our first staff meeting after the idea was hatched was all about brainstorming for the chat. When to do it, duration, number of questions, how to engage the kids, what to talk about, the hashtag, guidelines for participants. (Our principal, Dianne Conrod, flips the weekly staff meetings so that we can spend our time doing just this kind of thing.) (Take THAT anti-flippers.) We used a googledoc to put our ideas down.

Selling the idea

The teachers agreed to talk it up in class, and Peggy made and tweeted this powtoon:

Peggy's kids were ready to go on day one, for she and her students are the über-tweeters! Mine and Kerry's, were, for the most part, intrigued but not jumping-up-and-down excited.

Format:

We settled on a half-hour chat, with 5 questions. The guidelines would be given during class but reinforced at the beginning of the chat:

• Be honest but respectful in your answers.
• Use #lqchat
• Follow the Q1-A1 format
• Have fun!

Training:

Kerry put together instructions for the kids on how to use tweetchat. I thought to myself "Why the heck have I never used tweetchat?" for it is SO much easier than trying to keep up with a chat on twitter. We all spent a little time going over that in class the day of the chat, and also how to follow the Q1-A1 format so people can keep track of the many threads that typically develop during a chat.

Questions

We decided first and foremost to make it about the students, not about math or science. For one thing, not all of them are taking the same course, but mostly we wanted it to be a social activity.

We settled on these questions:

Q1 What is your favourite Valentine's treat?
Q2: What are the pros/cons of online classes?
Q3: What is the number one piece of advice you would give next year's new Learn students?
Q4: What is the one thing about online learning that has surprised you?
Q5: What topics would you suggest for future Twitter chats?

So what happened?

Just before it was time, twitter was alight with #lqchat. Kids were testing out tweetchat, and saying hello:

Then it was go time! I moderated the chat - a first for me!

The stream was incredibly fast and the kids were clearly having a good time. A few memorable tweets:

We didn't trend but we did have about 700 tweets by my estimate. And by estimate I mean I counted them just now. The participation rate was 35%, not bad! The half hour zoomed by, and I even had to think up another question on the spot -

For the full chat, here's the link to the tweetchat room, and here are the storifies that Peggy made, one for each question:

Prechat warmup
Q1:  What is your favourite Valentine's Day treat?
Q2: What are the pros/cons of online learning?
Q3: What is the number one piece of advice you would give next years’ new LEARN students?
Q4: What is one thing about online learning that has surprised you?
Q5: Do your friends who are not in online classes have a hard time understanding what it's like?
Q6: Do you have any suggestions for future chat toics?

Student feedback: I'll let the tweets do the talking:

And next day, in class, we talked more about it. Some feedback:

It was great to be able to go beyond our subjects, and get to know each other as people rather than classmates.

I loved meeting/tweeting with other students that I didn't even know existed! 

We're hoping that the kids will sell it for us now. AND maybe next time, we'll include the administrators from their schools, parents, former students - who knows? The twittersphere's the limit!