Participating In #EdChat

What is #EdChat?

EdChat is a chat created by educators for educators that takes place on Twitter using the hashtag #EdChat.  You can find out more about what exactly it is by watching the video below, and by visiting here. #Edchat takes place on Twitter Tuesdays from 11am-12pm and again from 6pm-7pm.

I am just starting out using EdChat, and so I had to figure out how to do it, and how to do it in the most productive and effective way.  I am still learning, but I thought I would put together this document for those like me who want to get involved but are not sure how.

How to be involved

Really all one has to do to be involved in #Edchat is just send out tweets with the hash tag #Edchat.  This is easy to do, but following the lively discussions that take place can be difficult, so I have compiled (and am compiling, as this list is dynamic) a list of ways to be involved and get the most out of the experience.

1. HootSuite.  HootSuite is a whole twitter suite that sits in your browser window.  Once you log in, you can create columns for different searches that you want to see, all of which update automatically.  You can tweet directly from this site and create dynamic auto-updating searches (including one for the hash tag #EdChat).  You can schedule tweets to be sent at a later time/date, and even add in other social networks so you can update them at the same time (eg. facebook, and foursquare).
2. TweetGrid.  TweetGrid is a website that allows you to interact with a particular hash tag chat in Twitter, including the ability to participate (to tweet) and an automatically updating window.  Very useful to watch just tweets for a particular topic live as they come in.  TweetGrid allows you to pause the feed whenever you want to take however long you need to read tweets.
3. TweetChat.  TweetChat is another website to interact with Twitter, and in particular, with a certain HashTag.  Some of its nice features are: not having to insert the HashTag when chatting, allowing to temporarily highlight certain users (users you are chatting with) and temporarily block other users (users who you are not chatting with at the moment), toggle from large to small font, controlling refresh speed from 5 to 60 seconds, and to pause whenever you need to take some time to read.  One of the other features TweetChat has that is very useful in a lively chat is “smart pausing”.  This occurs when you scroll down the page and are reading tweets.  The site detects that you have scrolled down the page, and will stop updating so that the page stays still so you can read it.  This is a nice touch.
4. WhatTheHashTag.  This is really just a twitter trending site that allows you to see how certain hash tags are being used throughout twitter.  However, a nice consequence of this is you can search for #EdChat and see some good stats for the last 7 days, including top contributors to this HashTag (which today are @rliberni, @doctorjeff, @olafelch, @teachingwthsoul, and @tomwhitby).  One additional nice ability this site gives you is to download a transcript.  All times are in Pacific time and so you will be looking for 9am and 4pm, but you can create a transcript and download all tweets for any given day.  Then you could copy them into an excel file and sort or search to your hearts content.
5. Archivist.  Though I haven’t tried it yet, apparently this is a great program for searching and downloading recent activity on Twitter.  There is a nice review here.

Request for Comments

Please leave a comment below if you have any other suggestions.  I will update this list as time goes on.  Do you prefer one or more of the above programs?  Do you hate one or more of them?  Why or why not?  Please give some feedback.  Thanks!

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