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"Social media may have started out as a fun way to connect with friends, but it has evolved to become a powerful tool for education and business. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter and tools such as Skype are connecting students to learning opportunities in new and exciting ways. Whether you teach an elementary class, a traditional college class, or at an online university, you will find inspirational ways to incorporate social media in your classroom with this list."

Cool little chart about activities that can be done on Twitter at the different levels of Bloom's.

"Whether you're new to technology, just getting started with a social network, or looking for some useful tips then these courses are for you. They're part of a new idea that I've been working on with a few friends. We're calling it Modern Lessons and it's essentially a 'Khan Academy for real-world skills' where a small handful of people build free online courses designed to help you learn some important things. But it's more than just a few useful videos about Twitter. There are customized certificates, quizzes, prerequisites, and more. But that's not important. The important part is what YOU can expect to learn. Since many Edudemic readers are teachers, there's a whole area devoted to teachers, don't worry. Adam Webster, an Oxford-educated teacher just outside London, has lovingly crafted a series of useful (and free!) courses designed to help you integrate technology into your classroom. More on that later. "

"The Modern Language Association likes to keep up with the times. As we all know, some information breaks first or only on Twitter and a good academic needs to be able to cite those sources. So, the MLA has devised a standard format that you should keep in mind."

"Alec Couros explains some of the strategies that seems to bear fruit when it comes to the adoption of technology for faculty members. He also touches on how to get started with Twitter, and shares some ideas on how to leverage social media for research."

"The expectation for researchers to have a presence beyond academia coincides with another shift that is making social impact now possible, for many researchers, and this is the rise of social media. These new, virtual environments are not just characterized by popular, personalized platforms like Facebook and Twitter, although I will come to these. Rather, social media encompasses the entire architecture of the scholarly Web today, best known as Web 2.0, which is a new way of organizing digital media content. While computing transformed scholarship in many ways before the rise of social media platforms, the average end-user experience, even for a novice, has altered considerably within just the last five years."

"Hashtag is a great way for users to locate and keep track of particular information within the massive tweets. Know the topic you are interested in and look for its corresponding hashtag and try to continually check it for updates. This is the established way Twitter experts use to fish for new updates in their fields of interest."

Lots of resources to help educators get started.

"The Digital Polarization Initiative is an attempt to build student web literacy by having students participating in a broad, cross-institutional projects around issues of digital polarization. The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news - from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

"I wanted to share some additional thoughts on Cliff Atkinson's new book, The Backchannel, and its implications for higher education.  As I mentioned in my earlier post, the first chapter of the book is available online and provides a very clear introduction to the logistics and possibilities of the backchannel.  What might the backchannel look like in educational settings?  Here are a couple of examples."

"Copyright and Creative Commons Explained by Common Craft can be very useful in helping students understand why they cannot simply copy and paste whatever images they like that they find online."

An interesting tool developed at Guelph to support student peer evaluation, assessment and review (PEAR)

"For the last decade or so, I've put my students' grades where my mouth is. Instead of just touting the importance of failing, I now tell students that if they want to earn an A, they must fail regularly throughout the course of the semester..."

"The buzz surrounding massive open online courses, or MOOCs, has grown nearly as massive as the courses themselves. MOOCs are the new "thneeds," the oddly-shaped items peddled by the Once-ler in The Lorax: Everybody seems to want one, even if nobody yet knows exactly what they are or what they mean. But amid all this MOOC mania, the University of Maine at Presque Isle is attempting a different kind of free online offering - one that would swap the scale of a MOOC for the high-touch experience of a conventional online course. Michael Sonntag, the provost, calls it a "LOOC": a little open online course."

"The greatest software invented for human safety is the human brain. It's time that we start using those brains. We must mix head knowledge with action. In my classroom, I use two essential approaches in the digital citizenship curriculum that I teach: proactive knowledge and experiential knowledge."