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One way the school district will provide up-close-and-personal updates on technology-aided learning is through the new "Tech Minute" series of short videos to illustrate the creative, personalized, and engaging learning taking place throughout our schools.

my approach is much more topic based with as little grammar as possible

The truth is, every platform has its strengths and weaknesses. My argument here is pretty simple–there is no perfect platform for student blogging because everything that does exactly what a teacher wants sucks for students, and anything that is exactly what a student wants will probably get a teacher fired.

seven quick reasons why Tumblr may be perfect for the writing / blogging / posting / literacy piece in your room: Students can post by email. There’s an “ask” system. It’s social-by-design. Hashtags, sharing, reblogging, tweeting–it operates both as social media and a blogging system. It’s flexible. It can be visual or textual; video or gifs; audio or links; conversational or one-sided. It’s already on their phones. Well, most of them. Though they may delete it when they found out that you know. It’s dead simple to use. Reblogging is an interesting way to share thinking–and simple too. Maybe too simple to be considered cognitive heavy lifting, but that’s all in how you use it. Liking posts, using hashtags, posting new blogs–all simple to do from a tablet, phone, laptop, or desktop. It’s platform-agnostic. It works (almost) equally well across operating systems, much like Evernote. In fact, it can be thought of as the Evernote of blogging platforms.

its primary feature, "circles," allows you to nest your contacts into different groups with Google suggesting "friends," "family," "acquaintances" and a twitter-style "following."

Remember to give students guidelines on ways they can respond. For example, they should not just say that they agree with what a certain student said. They should be specific and say what they agree with and why. Use specific examples in class of good posts and not-so-good posts.

talk to the other teachers in your school and try to agree on one or two social networking tools you will all use

however, for teachers to regularly monitor the networks, removing inappropriate posts and keeping a dialog open with students about appropriate use of the school social network.

This may seem obvious, but judging by the notices we have received, many teachers (and especially students) are under the impression that if it is on the web, then it is up for grabs.

That is, in some cases, if an image, text, video, etc. is being used for educational purposes, there might be more flexible copyright rules.

But make sure to check specific copyright restrictions before uploading anything you’ve scanned to the web!