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Social Media in the Classroom

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This page contains resources for using social media in the classroom. It is organized to first introduce the viewer to the "why" of using social media tools in the classroom. The next sections are titled by the specific social media tool that is being used.

These resources are focused on history and literacy in the k-12 setting. How to Use Social Media as a Learning Tool. Social media is an ingrained part of today’s society. Our students are constantly on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and likely many sites we’re not hip enough to know about, and by reading this blog, you’re interacting with social media at this very moment. If you want to bring the “real world” into the classroom, consider integrating social media into your lessons. No Longer a Distraction Image via Flickr by Sean MacEntee When used carefully, social media can be a useful tool rather than a distraction.

A recent Edutopia blog post argues that using social media not only brings current technology to the classroom, but it also helps bridge the digital divide among lower-income students. These students may not have the constant access to social media that their counterparts do. Education-based sites such as Edmodo, Edublog, and Kidblog provide alternative social media sites for posting status updates and announcements, blogging, and microblogging. Create a Class Facebook Group In Short. Teachers Guide to Teaching Using Social Media. March 26, 2014 The growing popularity and the pervasive use of social networking websites among our teens and students is a fact we can no longer ignore. Unfortunately, many school boards still promulgate laws that inhibit access to these platforms in schools and thus missing on huge learning opportunities for students.

Instead of forcing an unwarranted ban on these media tools why not embrace them and turn them into learning hubs where our students can thrive academically. Using social media in education has got such a huge potential and there are a variety of ways teachers and schools can leverage the networked power of these tools to help students achieve better. Here are some of the ideas I highlighted from the graphic below on how to use social media in class: 1- Facebook Pinterest source: Tech Tuesday screencast: TodaysMeet. Today’s Tech Tuesday screencast is about TodaysMeet. TodaysMeet is a backchannel site that allows a private text-based conversation to happen while another conversation/class/presentation occurs.

It’s like a private chat or private Twitter. It’s very simple and can be used on practically any Internet-ready device. Link to TodaysMeet: (For notifications of new Ditch That Textbook content and helpful links, “like” Ditch That Textbook on Facebook and follow @jmattmiller on Twitter!) Related Tech Tuesday screencast: Feedly Today’s Tech Tuesday screencast is about Feedly. April 23, 2013 In "Screencasts" 20 features of a great paperless classroom Going paperless has a lot of benefits. February 20, 2014 In "Ed Tech" Tech Tuesday screencast: Storybird Today's Tech Tuesday screencast is about Storybird. April 9, 2013. How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom. Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.

Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying. The Professor's results so far have been mixed but it is clear that more students are participating in classroom discussions than they used to. A video about Rankin's classroom experiment follows. It's funny to hear this history professor admit that "there are some topics we discuss that need more information" than Twitter's 140 character limit allows.

Some! GeoTweets – Inviting your network into the classroom. Last week I had a fantastic afternoon which saw, for the first time I can recall, my learning network impacting in real time on my lesson and the children’s learning. I had planned to do 2 sessions with our two Year 5 (9/10 yr olds) classes on the usual introduction to Google Earth type content but it all changed. Sometimes things just happen and I love those sort of sessions – the unknown, the edgy, the challenging sessions that we all learn more from than sticking to the usual, grey sessions we could do with our eyes closed. Pushing the boundaries a little. Needless to say Twitter and Google Earth were involved, and the latter is not a particularly new tool – but the combination of both created very powerful real time discovery.

A few moments before the children came in from lunch, I asked my network to challenge the children to find them in Google Earth, to search and discover their location from a few scraps of info via Twitter. Here is the Tweet I sent to prove we were there… and. The Twitter Essay. Consider the tangible violence technology has wrought upon grammar. We rely on automated grammar and spell-check tools in word-processing software (so much that they’ve become a crutch). E-mail shorthand fails to live up to the grammatical standards of typed or handwritten letters. And many believe our language is being perverted by the shortcuts (and concision nearly to the point of indifference) we’ve become accustomed to writing and reading in text messages and tweets. For many teachers and writing pedagogues, this is a travesty, a torturous fact of modern life that we all must contend with and defend against in our classrooms.

However, I would argue that we are at a moment in the history of the English language where the capacity for something wondrous is upon us. The evolution of written language is speeding up at an exponential rate, and this necessitates that we, as writing teachers, reconsider the way we work with language in our classrooms.

What is the posthuman? 1. 2. School Uses Facebook Timeline To Teach History. Amsterdam school, 4e Gymnasium, uses the social network's feature to chronologically document major historical events. History classes have created a new approach to studying major historical events. Amsterdam-based school, 4e Gymnasium, has taken advantage of the popularity of Facebook and the user-friendly Timeline feature to inspire a curriculum. The page allows students to create posts, link various media, and create dialogue with fellow classmates. The class is focusing on four subjects: Magellan’s voyages, 20th century inventions, Fashion history from 1950-present, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

By not only focusing on the content, but the chronology of events, students are able to experience a larger understanding of cultural and social themes, trends, and milestone achievements. Using Facebook to Engage with Historical Figures. Sara Romeyn, social studies department chair at Bullis School, MD, teaches AP U.S. History to high-school juniors. In this video (2 min. 47 sec. long), she describes a project in which her students used Facebook to report on early 19th-century reform and political figures. Instead of researching and using the collected information to write reports, students created Fan pages, hosting albums of images related to their figures, detailed biographies, and continual status updates written "in character.

" At the conclusion of the project, students gathered for a 45-minute "virtual salon," viewing and commenting on each other's pages. Students involved in the project demonstrated continual engagement, updating their pages and interacting with others' pages over weekends and after school. Check out an example of one student's project, on DeWitt Clinton.

NOTE: In order to view the video, you must be on a computer that has YouTube access. Teaching a lesson using diigo – part 2 | Andywhiteway's Blog. The second lesson using diigo gave me an opportunity to consolidate what had worked well the first time I’d used it with a class and also to try and provide more of a framework to make sure students used the features on diigo to give them a challenging learning experience. Students were to look at three different websites, each containing a different poem by W.H. Auden. On each site they would be required to highlight and explain a different piece of information from the poem. They would then be required to synthesise the three seperate explanations they had given about the poems into a conclusion on the overall message contained in Auden’s poetry, which they would post on the forum on our diigo group’s homepage. Students had one lesson’s prior experience of using diigo and got on with the initial part of the lesson quickly.

The quality of annotations Here are just a few examples of some of the feedback they left: Posting in the forum Key points to take forward: Like this: Like Loading... Using Skype to Teach History Transnationally: An Experiment. Think globally, act locally" has been popular mantra of environmental activists since the early days of the movement, and one increasingly adopted by historians, who are always looking for transnational perspectives in their research and bringing these perspectives into the classroom. By using readily available technology we can take this one step further and create a transnational classroom. This recently happened at Florida State University, where we experimented with linking, across the Atlantic, students from two classrooms via Skype. In spring 2012, while working as an adjunct professor at FSU's Department of History, I taught "The Baltic states since 1300s"—a course that the department chair, Dr. Jonathan Grant, was eager to support as part of department's mission to include more diverse aspects of European history.

Being myself from one of the Baltic states—Latvia—I saw a unique opportunity to present to a diverse group of students something new and challenging. Eman M. Using Technology in the Classroom: Holocaust Education via Skype at its best. I recently had the opportunity to link my Grade 11 class with a Holocaust survivor. So we put the iPads away for a class and linked up over Skype with the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society in Vancouver, BC (VHEC). VHEC has an outreach speaker program where they link a Holocaust Survivor with a classroom for a 60 minutes. This could be quite expensive for our class to travel down to Vancouver, so I asked them if they would consider connecting over Skype. And they said yes! During the last week of classes on 12 December 2011 we linked up with Lillian Boraks-Nemetz over Skype. Lillian told her testimony of what happened to her in Poland when the Germans took over and she found herself living in a ghetto.

We did not know until later that she is great story teller and an author of an acclaimed book titled: Old Brown Suitcase. For the most part the Skype connection went very well and everyone learned alot. I liked being able to hear her story and it impacted me in a big way. Blogging in the 21st-Century Classroom. This year, I admitted a hard truth to myself. I wasn't having my students write enough. In an attempt to follow Kelly Gallagher’s advice that students should write more than we can assess, I decided to have them blog weekly. One Assignment, Many Objectives After giving students some practice and solidifying my ideas by talking to a colleague and past student, I developed this assignment.

I tried to ensure that the assignment would: Address multiple Common Core standards Hold students accountable while minimizing stress Be structured enough to provide clarity while giving freedom to experiment Be varied enough to keep students engaged Get students to write for multiple purposes I introduced blogging to my juniors, reminding them to keep an open mind about this experiment (they could relate to that; I teach in a STEM school that focuses on life science and experimental research). It. Skill and Enthusiasm First and foremost, student writing is improving by leaps and bounds. Less Agonizing Pain. Taking History Personally: How Blogs Connect Students Outside the Classroom. Blogging, the use of the internet to post commentary or links, has taken off among historians, both in the academy and beyond.

For example, History News Network has a group blog of historians, and historians such as Juan Cole (www.juancole.com) and Joshua Micah Marshall (Talkingpointsmemo.com) provide daily, historically grounded commentary for the general public. Blogs offer a free or low-cost, easy-to-assemble web page, allowing historians to present ideas, opinions, research, or just to let off some steam. Although a daily part of life for many historians, the use of blogs for teaching has not yet been examined extensively. While there is some educational literature on the uses of blogs for K–12 and college classes, much of it is either how-to or why-you-should. In this article, I present initial findings from my experience in using a blog with an undergraduate Methods of Historical Research and Writing class at Eastern Michigan University (EMU), where I teach. Blogging Is History: Taking Classroom Discussions Online. Some people fear that new technology will seduce kids away from books: Why bother with old-fashioned reading when you can surf the Web or play your iPod?

But for one eighth-grade history class at South Valley Junior High School, in Liberty, Missouri, technology -- specifically, a blog and a podcast -- made a book come alive. In fall 2006, South Valley history teacher Eric Langhorst asked his American history class to read Guerrilla Season, a historical novel by Pat Hughes about two boys growing up in Missouri on the brink of the Civil War. He set up a blog to use as an online book group -- a place where all of his 300-odd students could join in the discussion 24/7. He invited parents and teachers to join in, too, as well as a middle school history class in California. Each week, Langhorst posted several questions for discussion. Educator and blogger Will Richardson pioneered the book-discussion blog in 2002, when his students read The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd.