The instructional technologists wanted to recreate the iPad walks for our teachers, but ran into challenges quickly. We can't possibly get enough substitute teachers to cover so that our teachers can visit another school and there isn't enough planning time to travel to another school. We finally decided to host a walk within their home school and have them visit classrooms just down the hall. We combined this day with our goal of promoting Twitter.
Teachers were surveyed so that we could make a schedule for each school showing which classrooms were open to visitors and what tools or apps they would be using. We distributed the schedule to the teachers and asked each of them to visit at least two classrooms. Teachers then had to share about the visits on Twitter using our district technology hashtag, #a1digitalinnovation.
These sessions were a big success. I have seen much more activity on our hashtag feed, one school created a school Twitter account and a hashtag, and many, many teachers told us that they loved getting to see the other classrooms and take those ideas back with them.
This PD session was completely free and very effective. I encourage you to give it a try and celebrate the innovation going on just down the hall.
Our Twitter efforts will continue. I sent a #ff email to each school sharing the handles of everyone in the building that tweeted so that they can follow each other. We also plan to have Twitter activities during our June conference and we've been regularly asking our teachers to tweet something they've learned at the end of a PD session as an exit ticket. There is an excellent article from Edutopia that lists other Twitter ideas.
Do you promote classroom visits or Twitter? I would love to hear about your ideas.