#FYSChat was a two week connected learning experience for first year students that I developed and delivered in collaboration with George Station a Lecturer at California State Monterey and Robin DeRosa Professor in and Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies program at Plymouth State University.
For this project we gathered all of our first year students that we were teaching in first year seminar courses together online in connected learning spaces. The event was meant to give students a taste of connected learning by starting with a one week shared digital annotation of a Washington Post article called Why Students Who Do Well in High School Bomb in College followed by an all day twitter chat.
This project allowed for students across the country to participate together in discussion around various nuances of their shared experience around being first year college students. Rooting the experience in an article allowed us to ground the project in something of interest to the students since the students had never met one another before. The twitter chat allowed growth of connections from the annotation project. Many of the students additionally followed up on their personal blogs to reflect on the experience. This project allowed students to see their shared experience from a variety of perspectives while building digital and networked literacies.