If you are fearful of Facebook and MySpace then you need to create an Edmodo account. Edmodo was designed specifically for educational purposes. You must be a teacher, student, or parent to gain access. It allows you all the amenities of those other social networking sites but with a lot more security/privacy.
Yes, it is free and you can manage student accounts. It is only open to those you invite in and only educators may obtain an account. You may monitor and moderate all conversations, administer quizes, embed media, etc. The groups feature is very effective and you may grant access to your group to other classes. We just had 700+ students interacting in a global collaboration project, Digiteen.
Students do not need an email address to use Edmodo, so under 13 is OK for CIPA. It looks much like Facebook, so kids love it and parents need some education on it as they fear it at first. Parents can get monitoring access so they may monitor their child's activity. It is a great tool to show parents how social media is used in education.
The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants
learn - like all immigrants, some better than others - to adapt to their
environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent,"
that is, their foot in the past.
There are hundreds
of examples of the digital immigrant accent.
our Digital Immigrant
instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age),
are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language
Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the
same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the
teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But
that assumption is no longer valid. Today's learners are different.
So what should happen?
Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their
Digital Immigrant educators learn the new?
methodology
learn to communicate in the language and style
of their students
it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with
more random access, among other thing
kinds of content
As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach
both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives.
Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been
done successfully. My own preference
for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even
for the most serious content.
"Why not make the learning into
a video game!
But while the game was easy for my Digital Native staff to invent,
creating the content turned out to be more difficult for the professors, who
were used to teaching courses that started with "Lesson 1 – the
Interface." We asked them instead to create a series
of graded tasks into which the skills to be learned were embedded. The professors
had made 5-10 minute movies to illustrate key concepts; we asked them to cut
them to under 30 seconds. The professors insisted that the learners to do
all the tasks in order; we asked them to allow random access. They wanted
a slow academic pace, we wanted speed and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script
writer to provide this.) They
wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They wanted the traditional
pedagogical language of "learning objectives," "mastery",
etc. (e.g. "in this exercise you will learn"); our goal was to completely
eliminate any language that even smacked of education.
large mind-shift
required
We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all
subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us.
Facilitating motivation involves a multitude of processes, seven of which will be examined here.1. Challenge2. Choice3. Control4. Caring5. Curiosity6. Competence7. Connectedness
I once held a department meeting when I was out of the building using this. I have also used it while showing a movie to classes; students can comment and get questions answered right away.
I've used it during a video in class. Kids are able to pose questions to each other, provide comments, state their opinions and express themself. Worked great.
Recently I had 9th graders talking to each other and me while they read a selection from their text. A couple of students did not like it, but most said it was helpful in understanding the material they were reading.
I use this often during my PBL activities. As students are researching, they post links to websites that are helpful for others and they post their ideas. At the end of the lesson, we look over the list one last time and make our whole-class decision based on our findings. My 5th graders love it and it has made their problem solving much better since it is based on research and collaboration.
4th graders used Today's Meet during Social Studies. They provided details related to a topic's main idea while studying a region of the United States. Worked great!
I wanted to show them that I was committed to becoming a better teacher and also to model for them the value of being open to constructive criticism of the work we do.
Videos for everything from why do it, to how to do it (buy the boards, set up the lectures, set up the tripod, upload).
Amazing resource for anyone slightly overwhelmed, but really interested in, the flipped classroom
Inspiration for a quick PD activity. After playing with a range of Apps, ask participants to place their app in the taxonomy (depending on use of course). Then, ask them if they can imagine a different way to use the app that might place it in a different section. This could also be used with SAMR, LOTI, Prensky, etc.