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make your own social network

For parents who want fun things for their students to do over the summer that will help students learn more and move forward in math and literacy skills - this is a website to check out. "Students enter the tournament by going to www.DimensionU.com/SummerChallenge. Once registered (parental permission is required) they will compete in math- and literacy-based games for a chance to win gift cards and summer-related prizes like inline skates, inflatable pools, beach volleyball sets, or tents. Five lucky players will be randomly selected to win an iPod Nano each. New this year is a social networking component that encourages students to build online "learning communities" of friends, family, community members, or even teachers - basically anyone who wants to help support the child's academic efforts during the summer. Participants who earn the highest number of social network points in each tournament round will win prizes separate from those awarded for game play performance."

Suggest this to parents.

There is a friends of Teaching 2030 on the Teacher Leaders Network. This is a national initiative of the center for teaching quality.

Science NetLinks is part of Thinkfinity, a partnership between the Verizon Foundation and 11 premier educational organizations. The Thinkfinity partners include the AAAS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Council on Economic Education, the National Geographic Society, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the International Reading Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and the Literacy Network.

Jonathan Trenn writes an article on the "fallacy of community" that many of the vendors at NECC should read. Edubloggers / educators/ educational groups of people emerge because we want to. We create a community when we need to and have the passionate desire for a common purpose. However, the word community and social network was so overused at NECC this year as to become a curse word. Used by people told it was important but who may not understand it themselves. This is a great article and strikes a cord with me.

An articlea bout the fallacy of community.

Information about the tapped in festival.

Tapped in has been a mainstay in education and a non threatening method of using chat to link with people around the world. This longstanding contributor to education has its 2008 Tapped In Festival scheduled for July 23 and July 24th with some neat things planned. This website has more information for you and certificates of participation will be available for those who participates. Teachers should connect in which ever way they feel most comfortable and the power of embedded networks should never be ignored.

I can say without hesitation that all my traditional educational experiences combined, everything from grade school to grad school, have not taught me as much about learning and being a learner as blogging has. My ability to easily consume other people's ideas, share my own in return, and communicate with other educators around the world has led me to dozens of smart, passionate teachers from whom I learn every day. It's also led me to technologies and techniques that leverage this newfound network in ways that look nothing like what's happening in traditional classrooms.

How to build professional, personal, social, and lifelong learning networks is the focal point of this post.

A social network for educators creating, organizing and sharing curriculum. 

education, teachers, learning, lessons, network, resources, information

education, edtech, social networking, e-learning today tv, texting, quiz makers, inspirational videos

Before you write off Twitter as just the latest social media "fad," take a look at how some clever educators are using it to enrich their classrooms and even forge informal professional networks.

Steve Hargadon's new whitepaper on social networking in Education (which does include some comments from Julie Lindsay and me.) Full disclosure: Elluminate provides Kim Caise, our Flat Classroom administrator, to us for 20 hours a week and we appreciate it very much. Go to this page to download the whitepaper.

This seems stuck in the notion of the 'course' as a transferrable, replicable unit of education, without acknowledging all kinds of educational interactions that happen around courses, in one-on-one conversation etc. If a course is a knowledge dump, then it can be replaced with recorded equivalents, it seems to me. But if it is an interactive experience, a conversation among learners with the instructor as lead/expert learner, then reproducing it on a mass scale simply won't work.

"ETAN provides a forum for educators and others to engage in the political process and project a unified voice in support of a common cause - improving teaching and learning through the systemic use of technology. ETAN's mission is to influence public policy-makers at the federal, state and local levels and to increase public investment in the competitiveness of America's classrooms and students."

There's a new "cable tv" in town... YouTube. That's right. YouTube may be launching paid premium channels this week. It will be quite interesting to see what happens if a video goes viral behind a paywall and if the free-for-all online video network will disenfranchise its netizens or if youth will take their game elsewhere. Of course, YouTube must continue to monetize and make development of content worth it for their content creators, but it will be interesting to see what happens, particularly with new networks like Vine cropping up around sharing video.

Here's a google apps consent form for another district. It also references the Network Access Agreement (We call ours an AUP - or acceptable use form) which is an important practice that ensures students know they must use the network in accordance with guidelines already given.

This is an interesting article from the Guardian's teacher network about running an independent newspaper using a Grammar school as a case study. I thought this quote is telling: "The key to the success of the newspaper is to establish a trust relationship with the students involved so that they know the boundaries of their independence and know where their responsibilities lie. The editorial team is appointed and led by the editor in chief, a student selected by an interview with me and the outgoing editor."