Group items tagged

You market, and your students share, books using social networking tools like Shelfari, Good Reads, or LibraryThing.

Your students blog or tweet or network in some way about what they are reading

You review and promote books in your own blogs and wikis and other websites. (Also Reading2.0 and BookLeads Wiki for book promotion ideas)

hy would I use a medium such as Twitter when I can Google what I am looking for?

Twitter is where I discover what I don’t know. Google is where I search for answers to an known problem

oogling info works well when you know what you want. Twitter can provide you value you didn’t know you wanted.

The Google model relies on rapid experimentation and data. The company constantly refines its search, advertising marketplace, e-mail and other services, depending on how people use its online offerings. It takes a bottom-up approach: customers are participants, essentially becoming partners in product design.

The Apple model is more edited, intuitive and top-down.

Steve Jobs had a standard answer: none. “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he would add.

Develop guidelines for use and share with your staff. Update your acceptable-use policy as well as personnel policies to reflect the district’s position on appropriate use of social networking sites. For ideas, check out the Social Media Guidelines for Schools wiki (http://socialmediaguidelines.pbworks.com). Many of the ideas presented here are adapted from this resource, which is meant to be shared and expanded as new information becomes available.

reate an official site for your school or district. To protect others’ privacy, set it up as a fan page so people can post comments or become a fan without giving you access to their personal pages. Commit staff time or resources to daily updates. Keep the tone conversational, but represent your organization and your position respectfully and responsibly. According to Pew Research, “44 percent of online adults have searched for information about someone whose services or advice they seek in a professional capacity.”

"It can take weeks of discussion, reading and searching, but once you have struck their passion, their eyes light up and you can't stop them," he says.

"There is really only one way to learn how to do something, and that is to do it."

Harnessing entirely pupil-led, project-based learning in this way isn't easy. But all of this frames learning in more meaningful contexts than the pseudocontexts of your average school textbook or contrived lesson plan, which might cover an area of the curriculum but leave the pupil none the wiser as to how it applies in the real world.

By forbidding the use of social media sites in 52% of our nation’s classrooms, schools are suppressing a learning revolution that is characterized by several truths: 1) facility with social media tools is critical to learning and working in the 21st century; 2) 75% of online adolescents are already social networking outside of school; 3) many students hack through Internet filters during class; and 4) exploration of social media sites is part of the adolescent identity.

Workshop reports that, on average, kids can actually stuff eight hours of media exposure into five hours of non-school time by media multitasking—phone texting while participating in seven separate Facebook chats and posting to Tumblr.

Dr. Howard Rheingold, on his final exam, asked his Stanford students to demonstrate their understanding of the literacies that accompany new media by creating, rather than writing, an essay. B

Experts figure that kids today read and write even more than previous generations. And they do so in a broader and more complex environment — though not always in academic ways.

Roberts wields every tool available to lift students toward "new literacies," the confluence of language and technology that's evolving as fast as researchers can study it.

as 21st-century literacies blend with traditional skills.