Sunday, February 6, 2011

The Classroom Social Network - Reflection



 The Classroom Social Network: It’s not just Fun, It’s Fundamental to Modern Learning
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=705
This K12 conference about social networing gave some insight on some ways to become more social Network friendly. Adrianne had talked about two main website to use with your kids, which are twitter and facebook. Twitter I was already familiar with me by using in our classroom now, but until this class I did not have a account with twitter. I do have a facebook account but until this presentation I wasn’t quite sure how you would involve facebook with your classroom students. I looked at facebook as be more of a non school social network but she proved me wrong. All though I do think you still need to be careful using facebook with your classroom.
The way she used these social networking site were more for outside the classroom assignments and to post reminders of when assignments are due. She also uses it for discussion. What I thought was great about twitter, which I didn’t know was you can receive the messages on your phone even if you do not have an iphone you can still get the message as a text. This way everyone gets the message. She brought up a good point she found that sending e-mails are harder because not everyone checks them all the time this way by using twitter everyone get the message the same time.
Facebook was the interesting part about her presentation. When using facebook you can create pages. She has a page for each class that she teaches. The pages she creates are not link to her personal page, so it still gives the teacher and student privacy. The student cannot see her page and she cannot see the students personal page in less it is public. Using facebook you can post pictures and link web pages. She had taking pictures of her white board with the notes and diagrams she drew for the class and posted them on facebook, so student can refer back to them and it is great for any student that missed class. I also think that is great for student that have a hard time listening and taking notes at the same time. They now can refer back to them as a backup.
             I never used blogs or twitter until this class and I feel is a great tool and gets students involved more in classroom participate and it is good for the teacher to see if students get the material that is being taught. I want to be a first or second grade teacher and it is a little bit harder to use these types of tools. What I would try to use is Skype, which was my previous blog.

1 comment:

  1. Very interesting... I'm not sure that I'd feel comfortable having to log onto my personal facebook account to connect with students, but if I created a school only account I think this could be effective. I definitely love the idea of using social networking in classrooms, but I think students on facebook don't always realize that a lot of what they post is public, and I think a lot of lines could be blurred. I agree that skype is a fantastic tool in the classroom and that finding a way to virtually connect students (whether by facebook page or something else) is a great idea!

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