This presentation doesn't follow a specific project, but it has some great ideas for using Twitter in the classroom. I particularly like Twitter book club, and Twitter as a backchannel.

This article discusses the use of Twitter outside the classroom to keep the conversation going. I like Twitter for this use because in large classrooms, not all students are heard. Using Twitter allows the shy students to have their say without having to voice an opinion in front of many others.

This blog has an entry titled: "Building School-Based Social Networks for Inquiry, in which he discusses building a social network for students named "Youth Voices." This site is for students to write and respond to each other and teach the value of peer interaction. The process of responding to each other has motivated student begin new posts.

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

Fantastic! Students use Twitter to take on personality traits of fictional characters in order to develop character empathy. They Tweet in the persona of the character and engage in conversation with other characters. Ultimately, students write a piece of FanFiction from their character's perspective.

Great use of Twitter in a 3rd grade classroom. Students tweet concise summaries, but the class also follows discovery education on Twitter to stream videos that DE links to in it's Twitter posts. I love Twitter as both a discussion/summary forum and a resource for materials.

Learn to be concise by using Twitter. Daniel Clinghard uses Twitter as a summary tool to help students understand the power of words. Students have to summarize political texts in the 140 character limit and write a good summary.

Great uses of Twitter in classrooms. For English, I like Dave's suggestions for teaching grammar's rules and structure, storytelling, and rule based writing.

These are some great ideas for using Twitter in the English classroom. In particular, I like using Twitter to build vocabulary, debate an issue or book interpretation, write a book review, or for short grammar exercises

This is an article about using Worlde as a tool in class. It isn't really used in social networking, but I think it could easily be tweeted or posted as an update on Facebook. The power is in the words and analysis of the rhetorical features in the words.

This article discusses a way to incorporate blogging as way to enhance student writing. Four classes take turn blogging once a week, and on the other three weeks, the other three classes comment. It's a great way to keep blogging fresh and hold students accountable for writing.

This is my plan for a positive digital footprint.

In this article, Wenger defines Communities of Practice (COP) as a "tribe learning to survive," (p. 1) although learning isn't always the goal of the group but can be an outcome. Members are committed to their community and create a shared practice of networking for a specific purpose. Originally associations and groups, the Internet is extending the reach of COPs and increasing the flow of information.

Eckert looks at Communities of Practice (COP) to study situated language use. She finds that the COP is important because of "its focus on the fluidity of social space and the diversity of experience" (p. 3). She finds the COP to be complementary to the speech community and that feedback between the two approaches would provide the best process for analysis.

This is Stephen Downes blog post explaining connectivisim. He asserts that knowledge is actually those connections created by actions and experience; the connections are not intentional. He discusses connectivism as the activities of connection rather than transferring, making, or building knowledge.

Denscombe argues that a research paradigm based on communities of practice might be the flexible multi-layered approach needed for mixed methods research. The basis of communities of practice states that learning is a collective activity and knowledge is shared. Mixed methods researchers share practices in a more formal paradigm than that of communities of practice; however, those communities of practice could still create the new paradigm that mixed methods needs. More research is needed to determine this for sure.

Siemens introduces connectivism as a theory for the digital age. He discusses the shift in learning theory that led to the creation of connectivism due to the need to make connections between specialized communities. He emphasizes the rapidly changing foundations of learning and information transfer and suggests that "creating, preserving, and utilizing information flow should be a key organizational activity." Ultimately, he suggests that connectivism is the way that education can meet the changing environment of learning.

Here the author argues that Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) are not an application but an approach to learning. They require a radical shift in how we use technology, but they supply a holistic environment where students learn to take responsibility for their own education.

Kop and Hill ask how existing learning theories meet the needs of today's learners and further question whether connectivisim is a learning theory. They do a very thorough study of learning theories to determine that "it does not seem that connectivism's contributions to the new paradigm warrant it being treated as a separate learning theory" (p. 11) even though it is important to the the development of new learning pedagogies.

In this scholarly article, Bessenyei discusses the current desire in education to decrease the alienation of traditional schools. He looks at connectivism and network theories as a way to decentralize learning into self-organizing networks. These networks allow information sharing to become more significant as students information sources are varied to include experts as well as other students from multiple institutions.