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Rethinking How We Communicate With Students Via an LMS by Audrey Watters on 02. Aug, 2011 in News Rethinking (Student) Communication When Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s new messaging system last year, he started the press event with an anecdote about his girlfriend’s little sister and her friends — how high school students use (or rather, don’t use) email. That’s not a surprising revelation to those of us who work or live with teenagers. A recent Pew Internet study found that only 11% of teens say they use email to communicate with friends, and even that figure seems a little high. For many students — both in high school and in college — email is not their preferred mode of personal communication; rather, it’s the mode they’re forced to use for professional purposes (i.e., for school). In its attempt to become the central hub of communications — personal and professional — Facebook’s new messaging system was seen as an attempt to “kill” email. (“Take that, Google!” is the subtext here, of course.) There are plenty of reasons why doing so makes sense (I mean, ugh, email), and even though it hasn’t killed email — not remotely — there’s a lot to like about Facebook’s new messaging system: it’s real-time. It ditches the formality of email. It can be synchronous or asynchronous, depending if the person you’re talking to is online. You can respond via email or SMS, so you aren’t force to visit the site in order to respond. Rethinking Communication via the LMS All of the things that make Facebook’s messaging system appealing for students and for schools — something I wrote about back in November last year — are largely absent when it comes to the traditional learning management sy

stem’s communication offerings

While the jury is still out on whether a tablet can replace a laptop, it is clear that tablets can be very useful for students. Whether it’s for reading text books, using specially-designed educational apps or just consuming web and social media contact, a tablet can be a valuable part of a student’s arsenal. Let’s take a look at some of the best tablets on the market.

According to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It, 65 percent of students entering school today will have careers in fields that haven't been invented yet. 

how do we prepare our students to write effectively in environments that don't yet exist?

as recently as four years ago, who would have imagined that major companies would have employees whose jobs were to interact with customers on Twitter, or that someone could make a career out of writing for Facebook? Four years before that, not only did those jobs not exist, Twitter and Facebook didn't exist

The common assumption is that these students, sometimes dubbed “digital natives” because they’ve spent their entire lives with the Internet and digital technology, are comfortable with and clamour for e-learning technologies. But, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Far from preferring to be immersed in a digital world of self-directed learning, students seem to still have an enormous desire for class-based lectures, the report’s authors claim.

What starts out as social networking is evolving into social production.

Social media has the potential to revolutionize our model of learning by transforming individual students from information silos into smart nodes within a dynamic and interdependent learning network. By serving as the connective tissue of a learning environment — whether it’s a class, school or community organized around common interests — social media can enhance student communication, collaboration and problem solving by aggregating perspectives. Through the process of sharing our perspectives we can get closer to seeing the whole picture. With a more comprehensive picture we improve our ability to innovate and problem solve.