Social Media Classroom: New Web 2.0 Platform for Education - ReadWriteWeb. The Social Media Classroom (SMC) is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more. The SMC is more than just a collection of new media tools repurposed for educational use, though. The end goal of the service is to move education away from being a unidirectional delivery of knowledge to become a more collaborative learning process. Why A Social Media Classroom? The SMC is meant to supplement, not replace, the face-to-face interaction that occurs in the classroom. According to Howard, when he tried to introduce new media tools into his first Wi-Fi-equipped classroom, he was surprised by the blank looks on so many of the students' faces when he told them that he expected them to blog and edit the wiki.
What's Included. Hacking Education (continued) Last fall I wrote a post on this blog titled Hacking Education. In it, I outlined my thoughts on why the education system (broadly speaking) is failing our society and why hacking it seems like both an important and profitable endeavor. Our firm, Union Square Ventures, has been digging deeply into the intersection of the web and the education business in search of disruptive bets we can make on this hacking education theme. My partner Albert led an effort over the past few months to assemble a group of leading thinkers, educators, and entrepreneurs and today we got them all together and talked about hacking education for six hours. The event has just ended and my head is buzzing with so many thoughts.
We will post the entire transcript of the event once the stenographer gets it to us. That usually takes about a week. In the meantime you can see about twenty pages of tweets that were generated both at the event and on the web by people who were following the conversation and joining in. Guide | The Enquiry Cycle | Enquiring Minds. See 'try it' for an interactive diagram of the enquiry cycle The Enquiring Minds cycle is a schematic way of plotting and carrying out any sort of enquiry-based activity. We have presented it as a wheel since we believe that students’ enquiries may well ‘cycle’ around in deeper and deeper levels of sophistication.
The enquiry model is intended as a focus for teachers and students to use in order to visualise progress on any extended activity. The four-stage enquiry model presented in this section is intended to allow teachers to develop the type of teaching and learning described in the previous section. Of course, it is quite possible to use this model in a way that does not allow students to develop a critical approach to knowledge. In the end, the success of an enquiry approach depends on the extent to which it allows students to be creators of knowledge which is relevant to them. top of page.