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This project gives students an introduction to ePals and allows them to connect with their ePals from another school. Students work to learn about other communities and cultures by discussing certain topics with their ePals and then creating digital presentations to share with their classmates.

Students from Ashwaubenon High School in Wisconsin created a video about the dangers of texting and driving and shared it with others by posting it on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. The project helped to increase awareness of the dangers of texting and driving through social media that students are using everyday anyway.

The Curation Project made students research and step outside of their comfort zone to experiences different types of social media. They were able to learned how to track and were able to see how they can share with other countries as well as "break the walls of the classroom".

This is a great article about projects teachers have done with digital tools. Not all of them used social media, but some used NING, blogs, and Google Docs for networking and sharing information. I like the fact that many of these projects are about using social tools like blogs to enhance writing skills

The PenPal News project was able to engage students and relate it to their own lives. Incorporating technology to change old school pen pals helps students connect from different states.

ePals is for classroom teachers to create and participate in a variety of projects. This is a great site that connects teachers with other teachers from around the world to use social networking and create global learning environments.

The Flat Classroom® Project is a global collaborative project that joins together middle and senior high school students. This project is part of the emerging tend in internationally-aware schools to embrace a holistic and constructivist educational approach to work collaboratively with others around the world in order to create students who are competitive and globally-minded.

This post talks about a project where graduate students at John Carroll University were asked to use social media while learning about gender in modern Africa. The students created a public awareness campaign around an activism project. They were then charged with using social media to get the word out about their campaign. 

ISTE 2012 Movie Project Workshop

This page discusses some ideas for Project-Based Learning in the world language classroom. I am really excited about this page because it gives some really great ideas. The author says that not many teachers are using PBL in a world language classroom, so we are paving the way.

Here is a specific example from the Global Classroom Project.

This is an example from the Flat Classroom Project that unites teams from various schools through out the US and the world to compare/contrast their demographics and what represents their country. Each group does a final project they present to the other schools in the cohort.

This is a collection of four short essays by Etienne Wenger from April 2009. Here he explores the role of an initiative of the European Social Fund. While many projects and solutions came out of this initiative, he states that it is the invisible scenes behind the projects that may be the biggest accomplishment. Wenger reiterates that more and more people are understanding the power of the learning shift from formal to informal, but more examples need to be studied as well. Interesting read.

Great example of the Networking Project for Edtech 541

Project K-Nect is designed to create a supplemental resource for secondary at-risk students to focus on increasing their math skills through a common and popular technology - mobile smartphones.

In North Carolina, about 100 ninth-grade students in four schools in North Carolina have been issued smartphones for use in their math classes. They use the phones to network among themselves on problems, receive instruction from teachers, play math-improving games, or watch an animation showing the problem being solved.

Through a grant from a smartphone maker, students were given devices that would allow them to contact other students and tutors about math problems when not at school. It also gave them access to materials for class that they otherwise would not have had away from school. While this wouldn't be applicable in all schools, the social networking aspect of the program helped students better manage their personal learning experience.

This site provides a list of current Internet projects going on between schools around the world. Search by grade level and topic to find an existing project to join or post your own to find partner schools. (Week 3, Link 2 for EdTech541)

This project has students examining statistics using blogs. For this project, the teacher gave her class data from a survey given to students from the year prior. The classes goal was to tell a story of the prior years class using statistics. Students had to find tools online to create visual representations of their data. They used their class blog as a hub for exchanging good resources and ideas. When they finished creating their visuals and summarizing the data, they finalized their work in a personal blog entry. Then students shared their blog posts and were given time to read and comment on other students interpretations. This a great project because it gives students an opportunity to write about math which doesn't happen as often as it should. It also gives students insight into all the different ways a set of data can be perceived. I like extending this idea of blogging to being a hub where students finalize and reflect on all of their projects during the year. As an English teacher, I value writing. I really value and chance I can to incorporate writing into my math class.

This long-term project has students creating a blog that serves as their reading response journal for the year. For this assignment, students created a blog to replace their hardcopy notebooks. As students read various things in their English class, they use this one place to do all reading activities. Once they have finished posting, they then receive time to go and comment on other people's posts. This gives students a place to practice their writing skills with an authentic audience. As the year goes on and students get more comfortable with commenting, students could end up having rich conversations based on each other's writing. I like this because it is easy to set up and use for the course of the year. This can be applied to almost any subject area. Even a math teacher could use something like this for students to summarize their learning and bounce ideas off of their peers. The functionality and utility of this project make it a must-have for educators of all subject areas.