Twitter Bingo

I’ve been evangelizing about Twitter for years. Every chance I get, I tell people how Twitter changed my life and how building my PLN is the best thing I’ve ever done for myself professionally. Several years ago at CMS, I hosted a Twitter Boot Camp for my teachers. Over the past three semesters, I’ve worked with my technology department at Episcopal to use Twitter Bingo as a tool to introduce Twitter to our faculty and get them using it to build a professional network.

What I like about using this format for Twitter Bingo is that the teachers were able to work at their own pace. This also introduced them to a wide range of Twitter activities — from simple things like following and re-tweeting to participating in a full on Twitter chat. Instructions were linked to each square, but teachers really had to get in there and figure it out for themselves. Don’t we tell our students all the time that this is the best way to really learn something?

On the technical/creation side of things, I made the grid using Canva and imported the image into ThingLink to add the tutorials for each square. Since I ran this separately for each division (lower, middle, and upper school), I changed some of the who-to-follow squares in order to help tailor their network to their area.

Of course we used prizes to entice participation. Teachers filled out a Google Form to let me know they completed all the squares, giving a very short blurb on what they learned from their experience on Twitter. Here’s what a few of them said:

“I thought I would immediately want to unfollow the people I was told to follow because I didn’t really want to be following so many people. I have had actual interaction with these folks, so now they are real people to me, and I will continue to follow them because they have great ideas.”

“I had no idea what these chat hashtags were all about and then realized it was a way to interact more efficiently on a topic with the Q and A style. I like it!”

“I am still working on building my community so that my feed is always showing something helpful but I have enjoyed seeing what other teachers are doing. I found Responsive Classroom to have the most helpful ideas quickly.”

“This is great! I should have started a long time ago!”

As I said before, we learn best by doing. This was a great way to get some of my teachers really digging in to Twitter. Did everyone participate? Not even close! But many of those who did continue to use Twitter and are finding it to be such a valuable resource in their professional lives. That’s more than good enough for me!