Schools and Social Networking

Teachers across the nation are using social media in their classrooms. My favorite example came from two like minded educators that use Facebook to create character pages for the book they were studying. Other take aways were to use social media sites to communicate with students and parents. From giving them a heads up of due dates, to answering specific questions about assignments, the students and teachers were always connected. Personally, I have a school Google email address and a Google Voice number that I give to students for communication. They are catching on slowly, yes, it is okay to email or text me any time, I will get back to you. Students love it and I love it. My ScoopIt shows all of the different ways in which social media sites can be used in the classroom.

http://www.scoop.it/t/classroom-projects-using-social-media

PLE Diagram

I found the image below originally on Twitter and then went and Googled it. I felt it was a good reflection on connections. My personal learning environments were comparable to fellow colleagues. We all had Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn.

Of all of the colleagues I looked over, Markette Kalamete and I only had a couple in common, Twitter and LinkedIn. She had several others that I recognized, and also several I had never heard of such as NSTA, Informal Science, and Bloomed Expert. Her background image of the science teacher being fed through IV's was very creative.

Kyle's imagery of the football field and the players on the team being connected was well done. We had a couple similar sites and several different ones.

Katie Sisson and I had almost all of our sites the same with the exception of WordPress. I didn't include any blogging sites in my diagram.

I liked Karen Arnold Cameron's wheel diagram. It shows the spokes supporting the rim. She has some great sites I didn't think to add such as Edutopia and Ted-I use these all the time. The one that is new to me was edWeb, I'll have to look into it.

The tree position imagery done by Sarah Baughman was a great analogy. As a tree we are always growing. She has several sites that I am not familiar with such as the orange "W".

Levi Fletcher did an amazing food web to represent his PLE Diagram. I was sitting in a meeting with a teacher who has a Science background and without reading Levi's blog, she looked over and said, "That's a food web." Before I read the post I was confused, but now that I have read his blog, he did a great job setting up his analogy. We have many of the same sites and a few different. EdWeb came up again.

Collaboration on Creating Criteria

It has been a great pleasure to work with some exceptional classmates, Jody, David, and Google Docs. David was able to get us started using a shared Google Document. We met online and had some great conversations in the chat window as well as in Facebook's Messenger window. When one or the other wasn't online we were able to leave comments on the collaborative document to address as a whole later. Google is a great tool for collaboration, however, I am very biased. I am sure there are equally great collaborative tools out there. I enjoyed being able to work collaboratively with my classmates. I do this with my students as well, but have never experienced it on this level. I even learned a few things about my classmates I didn't know, it was like sitting down with someone and getting to know them even though we are all in different time zones.
Link to Criteria Checklist