Global Networks: Computers and International Communication. 9781134559343_sample_513981.pdf. The Changing Social Spaces of Learning: Mapping New Mobilities. Writing on contemporary culture and social life, sociologists and cultural theorists have been describing new or changing forms of movement, variously described as cultural “flows” (e.g., Appadurai, 1996), “liquid life” (Bauman, 2005), or a “networked society” (Castells, 1996).
The change in such movements or mobilities of people, media, material goods, and other social phenomena, including the reach or extension of such movements, connections between “global” and “local” life, the creation of new spaces and places, and new speeds and rhythms of everyday social practice, is arguably the most important contrast between contemporary social life and that of just a decade or two ago. Despite these changes and longer conversations about their meanings in a range of disciplines, mobilities and their relations to learning within education are still understudied and undertheorized. Making the Most Out of Teacher Collaboration. Nose to the grindstone, I prepared for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday -- what to teach, what to test, and how to learn.
I gave it my best shot, alone. I was the only Spanish teacher. What did I have to say to teachers of other disciplines? Other than collegial greetings, I did not seek them out. How stupid could I have been! I should have taken the time and effort to collaborate! How stupid could I have been! I remember feeling so frustrated about classroom discipline that I had decided to teach college instead of high school. Nope, I was intent on saving the world by myself. A lot of help! Avoiding Teacher Isolation Perhaps I am an extreme example of what not to do, but I have witnessed a general sense that teachers, when it comes to their performance in the classroom, tend to stick to themselves.
Personal Steps to Effective Collaboration If I had it to do again, this is what I would do to get the most out of my formal and informal collaborations with other teachers: The Power of Teacher Collaboration. Teaching is simultaneously one of the hardest and one of the most rewarding jobs in the world. We often say that students make it worth it, but there’s something else that can make or break your happiness as a teacher: your colleagues. In this article, “Research Shows Teacher Collaboration Helps Raise Student Achievement,” researcher Carrie Leana writes about the missing link in school reform: teacher collaboration. In her study of over 1,000 4th and 5th grade teachers in New York City, Leana found that, “students showed higher gains in math achievement when their teachers reported frequent conversations with their peers that centered on math, and when there was a feeling of trust or closeness among teachers.”
Collaboration begins with finding time to connect with colleagues, to share thoughts, and provide support. Here are 3 tips for successful collaboration: 1. Remember to ask your colleagues to share their trials and triumphs with you, too. 2. Teaching as a Team Sport (Video Playlist) Multimodal Composing in Classrooms: Learning and Teaching for the Digital World. Teacher Identity and Selective Strategies for Mediating Interactions with Students on Facebook | Shobha Vadrevu. Should Teachers Friend Their Students? One of my favorite teachers told me once that he dressed the way that he did — jackets, ties, and other business attire — because he wanted us to know that, while he was our teacher, he was not our friend. And I thought that made sense. It was his job to advocate for us. To challenge us. To help us be the best we could be. And so he wasn’t our friend. One of our many jobs as teachers is to keep a professional separation between who we are and what we do.
In social networks, this looks like being present, being thoughtful, and being intentional in the ways that we use those spaces to promote what we think is essential — ways that do not confuse our teacherness and our friendness and help our students understand the difference between the two. I made a choice as I moved forward in working with and building online spaces for teaching and learning that I wouldn’t friend current students on Facebook. Facebook is not her primary online space for interacting with students. About the author. When teachers and students connect outside school. In my last entry, I made a comment about the value of “cool” teachers interacting with students on social network sites. I received some push-back from non-educators. Most of the concerns revolved around teachers’ ethics and their responsibilities with respect to legal structures like the Federal Rights and Privacy Act.
There were also concerns that teachers who would interact with students in these environments would be putting themselves at risk. There is undoubtedly a lot of fear about teacher-student interactions, both in the US and elsewhere. All too often, there is an assumption that when teachers interact with students out of the classroom, they have bad intentions. The fear about teacher-student interactions also worries me at a broader societal level. Do teachers have to comply with federal privacy laws? Most of what teachers hear from students outside of the classroom might be answerable by students’ parents if only youth felt comfortable asking them. Social spaces, casual interactions, meaningful exchanges: 'information ground' characteristics based on the college student experience. Introduction Since the 1990s context has been a foundational concept in information behaviour research, a paradigmatic cornerstone for capturing holistic perspectives and nuances.
However, in our efforts to understand information behaviour phenomena from the perspectives of different actors or stakeholders (including organizational), the ambient role of place has been subsumed within the broader big picture, meaning little attention has been paid to understanding the specific effects of social settings on information flow. Notwithstanding the work of Chatman (e.g. 1992, 1996), whose ethnographic approaches subsumed the effects of setting, the majority of researchers only include shades of setting as ambient factors in the study of overall context (Leckie and Hopkins 2002; Shill and Tonner 2003; Wiegand 2003). The everyday life information behaviour of college students What are students' information grounds? The students and their information grounds The people-place-information trichotomy. Social space. A social space is physical or virtual space such as a social center, online social media, or other gathering place where people gather and interact.
Some social spaces such as town squares or parks are public places; others such as pubs, websites. or shopping malls are privately owned and regulated.[1] [edit] As metaphor, 'social space contributes a relational rather than an abstract dimension...has received a large variety of attributes, interpretations, and metaphors'.[5] Such 'social space...i[s] an intricate space of obligations, duties, entitlements, prohibitions, debts, affections, insults, allies, contracts, enemies, infatuations, compromises, mutual love, legitimate expectations, and collective ideals'.[6] Morphology[edit] For the individual, as well as the social institution, different levels of social space come to the fore at different times. Pre/postmodern space[edit] The insanity of place[edit] Cultural examples[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] Further reading[edit] Getting_started_educator_mpb.pdf. New Teacher Boot Camp Week 2 - Using VoiceThread.
Editor's note: See the full archive of the five-week boot camp. Week 2: Using Voicethread in the Classroom Welcome to our second week of New Teacher Boot Camp! Today we're going to be exploring VoiceThread. About VoiceThread VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slideshow that allows students to comment on images, documents, and video through text, video, and audio files. P> Introducing Megan Palevich Megan Palevich is curriculum specialist and 8th grade language arts teacher in Chester County, PA. Before reading on, please take a look at this example of a VoiceThread from Megan's eighth grade class based on the novel The Red Kayak, by Priscilla Cummings.
Megan Palevich, Curriculum Specialist and 8th Grade Language Arts, on Using VoiceThread This year I used Voicethread as an alternative way to discuss literature. Instead of a traditional read and respond or read and discuss, VoiceThread could offer my students the opportunity to listen and reflect through text, audio, or video. "Knowing Someone" in Social Spaces is Complicated. Posted by Bill Ferriter on Friday, 03/07/2014 danah boyd is on my mind again tonight. In her newest book It's Complicated (link is external), she argues that teens reveal different parts of their identities to different social groups using different social tools and services.
As an example, she spotlights a teen girl who uses Facebook to connect with friends from school and Twitter to connect with fans of One Direction -- a boy-band that she is passionate about. While there was some mixing in her social circles -- friends from school who shared her passion for One Direction interact with her in both Facebook and Twitter and One Direction fans she meets on Twitter sometimes become a part of her network on Facebook -- she's gotten really good at contextualizing her identity from network to network.
As boyd explains: Context-specific participation in social spaces, though, doesn't come without digital hiccups. #nope On Twitter, you see a slightly more playful version of me. #notsure. Social Media for Teachers: Guides, Resources, and Ideas. Although students are evermore connected to the social web, many of these networks remain out-of-class digital playgrounds where students congregate. In a 2014 survey of 1,000 teachers, just one in five said they use social media regularly with students. Of course, it can be a challenge to incorporate social media into lessons. There are many gray areas for teachers to navigate, like setting guidelines, accessibility at school, and student safety.
But to help teachers navigate this ever-changing landscape of social media tools, here are some of the best guides on the web for four popular networks, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. More Great Reads From Edutopia In addition to those great guides, there is a lot of useful information right here on Edutopia. Anagnostopoulos2005.pdf. Introduction to Using "Voice Thread" Voicethread. Beginning with email and instant messages and stretching to texting and synchronous video web conferencing, digital dialogue has gradually become a common element of everyday life for today's students—another opportunity to “gather.”
The kinds of personal relationships shaped on the playground in an earlier era are now developed in MySpace and Facebook. While the format may be different, the purpose remains the same: Our students are crafting identities and are driven to connect. Unrelenting Desire to Interact This innate and unrelenting desire to interact was probably best defined Danah Boyd—a PhD student at the University of California-Berkeley studying the networks developing between digital youth—in a 2008 blog post when she wrote: School is one of the few times when they can get together with their friends and they use every unscheduled moment to socialize - passing time, when the teacher's back is turned, lunch, bathroom breaks, etc. Sounds a lot like your own students, doesn’t it!