Environmental Education #TeachAgChat

I had the pleasure of conducting a national Twitter chat (#TeachAgChat) November 5th with my fellow cohort member Matt Holt (@mholt5595). We both have interest in environmental education so decided on the topic: Integrating place-based environmental education in school based agricultural education to improve environmental literacy!

The planning of the Twitter chat was not too time consuming and the real stress didn't start until 5 minutes before our Twitter chat started. We spent the week leading up to the Twitter chat narrowing down the questions we wanted to ask, who would be guest experts, and what jobs Matt and I would take on for the hour we were engaging the nation in a chat about environmental education. I ended up engaging participants while Matt put most of his focus in engaging the experts to maximize their presence. I think the Twitter chat went well even with all the anticipation from the week leading up to one hour of engaging about environmental education.

We developed an infographic using easel.ly and shared it extensively through Twitter and in Facebook groups that we thought might be interested. We tweeted daily for the week to get people excited for the chat. We also spent extensive amounts of time researching experts and contacting them. Although many people never responded or said they couldn't make it, we ended up with 3 reliable experts that participated extensively through the whole chat. It was quite varied since one expert was the moderator of an #EnviroEd chat every week and another expert had never used Twitter! Overall, our experts were engaging and provided the participants with valuable resources and information.

 All of the questions are sent out by the @TeachAgPSU twitter account while Matt and I moderated and facilitated discussion between participants. Throughout the chat I felt as though it was great conversation, but not moving as quickly as I thought. Once I received the statistics compared to other #TeachAgChat 's I realized I was right. Compared to the first three we had the most people participate in our chat, but also the most people that only tweeted once and a lower number of tweets. In a way it is positive that we got more people to participate, but I think if I did something similar in the future I would try harder to engage people to encourage more tweeting and interacting. It was quite an experience that required planning and networking, and well worth the experience getting to know some field experts and converse with the great minds in Ag and Enviro ed!

If you want to see some of the highlights of our twitter chat on environmental education check it out here: https://storify.com/mholt5595/teachagchat?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=email&utm_medium=email