Real Time Chats

This week, one of my assignments for my online teaching course was to participate in an online, real-time chat.  It just so happened that I was invited this week to join a group of physics teachers active on Twitter for an online PLC.  The group meets in a Google Hangout, then shares and discusses examples of student work using tools like screen sharing, Google Drive, and Evernote.  The group tries to shares both successes and struggles in an effort to learn from each other and become better teachers.

While I've previously interacted with some of the participants via Twitter, the chat provided opportunities for a different sort of interaction.  First, we were able to share and respond to student work more freely than on Twitter.  I have seen teachers share anonymized student work on Twitter, but it is almost always a positive example showing some interesting thinking or providing a good example of a skill.  Those are great to see, but the most interesting discussions center around an example of a misconception or the work of a struggling student.  However, I doubt many parents or students would be happy to see the errors in their work being dissected in a public forum.  The closed chat makes it possible to share and study the kind of work we can learn the most from.

It was also nice to not only get people's thoughts in chunks longer than 140 characters, but to hear the tone of voice and see the facial expressions or gestures that accompanied the comments.  This allowed people to express complex thoughts and engage in a depth of conversation that is simply not possible on Twitter.  In addition, the chat provided an immediacy to the conversation that allowed ideas to gain a momentum that can be difficult to generate on Twitter.

The overall experience was fairly similar to the face-to-face conversations I've had at conferences and, as I get to know these people, I expect it will more and more like the face-to-face PLCs I've participated in.  This group actually provides some advantages over face-to-face communication as it does not have geographical limitations.  I've started making connections with teachers outside of my district, but most teach courses similar to mine in schools similar to mine at schools within a few hours of mine.  This online PLC includes people from across the United States teaching a variety of courses in some very different schools.  As a result, the PLC includes a wide range of different perspectives which I look forward to learning from.

While there is significant value in time-shifted, text-based communication, a real-time online chat can provide additional layers of interaction.  The same benefits I've found in the real-time chat with the online physics PLC can be reaped by an online teacher.  A crucial part of teaching in any setting is building relationships between teacher and student and between the students themselves.  Just as a real-time chat allowed me to engage in more meaningful interaction and to forge deeper relationships with other teachers, this tool can be harnessed in an online classroom to allow the teacher to connect with students and for students to connect with each other.