Do Popular Social Networking Applications Have A Place In The Classroom? A Growing Number Of Educators Say 'Yes'. The post, "100 Ways To Teach With Twitter", is one of the most consistently viewed article on this site. Similarly, "Facebook As An Instructional Technology Tool", resulted in the 2nd most trafficked day here in 2010.
Here is a very thorough analysis of the use of technology in the classroom. I found it to be in-line with a lot of my own thoughts and feelings on the subject.
Harry discusses how the study of Social Media can help us better understand how youth are acting and interacting both online and offline, how young people adeptly navigate a growing and increasingly diverse assortment of social media, and how we can (and must) incorporate and account for social media in the classroom.
Thank you for posting. I thought this was a very interesting TedTalk to watch. It gave some really good reasoning for adding social media into the classroom.
Can we afford to keep ignoring this dominant means of communication? Over the last few weeks we've been interviewing college staff and faculty as part of our
Millennials live and breathe on social media, so teachers are learning how to incorporate the medium into the classroom successfully. In doing so, teachers not only encourage students to engage actively in the material, but they also provide online communities for students that might not exist for them in real life.
Suggestions include: having students use Twitter, Facebook and Flickr to share work, using hashtags to live tweet, requiring students to blog, using LinkedIn to reach out to experts, using Google Hangouts for virtual office hours, post assignments and messages in Edmondo, conducting class in Second Life.
This post assumes you already know the basics of how to use Twitter. You know what a hashtag is and what purpose an @mention serves. If you need a general overview of how Twitter works and why it's useful for teachers, we recommend starting here.