Subscribe to RSSThe Power of Twitter – Math help from over 200 people…
This past Tuesday one of my daughters was working on her Math homework in my office. Two of the problems said for her to collect data from a class. For the first, my tech club was still available so she quickly polled the students and tallied the results for her graph. But for the second of the data collection questions, there were no students in my classroom or office.
My first instinct was to tell her to make up the data – the point of the problem was for her to make a pictograph. But instead, I quickly – as in less than five minutes! – created a form on Google and posted on my Twitter account a request for people to respond to that survey. Meghan, Madelynn and I each entered our own choices into the form. By the time we left my office at 5:10pm, we had 40 responses. That was less than an hour later. By the time she did that last problem at home, there were 188 responses. And they came from all over the world! She and her sister sat slack-jawed watching the spreadsheet continue to populate with answers. I edited her form to show that the question was done, but responses kept coming. I did a search on Twitter and my little request for participation had been retweeted 17 times. As of the writing of this blog posting, there are 258 responses for nearly every state in the Union, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia,Thailand, Spain, Germany, Russia, and the middle East!
I had wanted to map the results for my daughter in Google Earth, so she could see where all of the responses came from. I was more than a little overwhelmed, though, at having to manually add in SO many places. As if I wasn’t already tickled enough with my Twitter network, I posted what I thought was a rhetorical question, “wish there was a way to upload list of locations to Google Maps and it would put flags everywhere. Does anything do that?” Within minutes, @glovely had sent me a link to MapAList which pulled the data straight from my Google Spreadsheet! Unfortunately, I had to wait a few hours for our tech services department to unblock the site (*grumble* but at least they were fast about it). In the meantime, @xmath2007 sent me a link to a Google code site that also pulled data from Google spreadsheets. This was awesome too, but I hadn’t recorded location data in a way that would make this one work for me.
Eventually, MapAList was unblocked and I was able to produce a map flagged all responses through the form for which I had location data! And I didn’t even have to go back and reformat any of the entries.
If I had any doubt in the power of Twitter, it would have all been erased by this, but then, I never had any doubt.
Thank you Twitterverse. Thank you for turning a math homework global and making the world a little flatter for my daughter.
10 People have left comments on this post
Apr 10, 2009 - 01:04:46This was so fun to be a part of. I’m going to be following your blog now. Using the RSS feed, and will be watching via twitter as well. gailpotratz ..tweet
That WAS a fun little exercise! I took the link and passed it on to my church group, who also participated in the survey.
Doing this, and seeing the responses made me more determine to learn to use Google Apps this summer. Glad it worked out for your daughter!
Do it once and it works brilliantly. Do it a second time and it works, sort of. Do it a hundred times and…?
… and your Twitter followers stop dropping you like a hot potato. :) It’s funny that you say that, too. I shared this experience with the third grade teachers I work with (since my daughter is in third grade). One of them jumped all over it and wants to do this with her whole class. I’m very hesitant to ask my Twitter network to participate again. If I do, it won’t be for quite awhile and it won’t be for this teacher’s whole class (unless they do a combined survey). I know that I’d be quite annoyed if every tweet I saw from a user was a request to answer a survey.
I was actually kind of daystorming? (daydreaming + brainstorming) a way to post all of these kinds of requests in a single location. I wouldn’t mind spending ten minutes every morning answering surveys and reading particular student blogs. It wouldn’t as much traffic, I know, but half those answers in half those locations would have been exciting. I think for my teachers my might look toward Jen’s Ning or maybe something like ePals or somewhere more appropriate to hook up, but for this one time, as I said, I’m very grateful to my Twitterverse. Hmm… maybe I can set up an auto-publishing Twitter account that teachers can DM their request to, then it published out the request and then only teachers/edtech that follow it will see it anyway. Hmm…..
This is a really neat idea. I love the integration of Google and Twitter and using the world.
You know, Anna, you bring up a good point. There are an infinite number of ways we can show teachers the power of the network, but unless they build *their own* learning network, the power they see doesn’t have an impact on their teaching and learning situation.
The other point that has to be acknowledged is that while you’ve spent the time and energy to build a network that can make a project like this thrive, an average teacher can’t expect to see that kind of return until they’ve made an investment into their PLN community. As you sow, so shall you reap.
The first and most powerful step for anyone who wants to help others would be to help teachers build their own PLN using whatever tools best fit their needs. Twitter is one tool, but if they envision a network built to help them more in projects and curriculum, they might look to sites such as Teachers Connecting at http://www.teachersconnecting.com
Great project and I’m thrilled I got to be a part of it and to see how far and wide one Twitter community can reach!
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