Social Media

Before this class, I never considered a social media option in an education setting. I always felt that they would be distracting and unproductive. However, this course has opened my eyes to many new possibilities so as I reflect on this week’s blog post I do so with an open mind to new ideas.

I started with the article The Social Media Teacher – Do’s and Don’ts. Since I never had thought about the area of social media in the classroom I felt this was a good place to begin. Below are my summaries and conclusions about the Do’s and Don’ts presented.

 

Borrowed from Positive Results Marketing 

The Do’s:

1.     Spice up your classroom – This can enhance writing skills through new areas such as blogging, instead of old tactics such as journaling.

2.     Get yourself involved – You may consider having a page yourself as the teacher in the social media site you choose. This allows you to post assignments, discussion topics, or leave comments on student work.

3.     Set up a monitoring system – A teacher needs to understand how he or she will make sure that the language and conversations going on online are appropriate. A teacher should also make sure that there are no online dangers to their students.

4.     Personal Learning Network – The use of other resources and people to connect and share ideas!

The Don’ts:

1.     Forget about online reputation management – It’s important to keep personal and professional life separate.  You also have to consider about the content your students are posting and how they will be a representation of themselves, your class, and the school.

2.     Become stagnant – A teacher should do their best to keep their educational social media site active and engaging. Once a teacher becomes inactive, students may loose interest and attention.

3.     Try and do too much – Educators must understand their limits and be prepared to manage a social media site to the best of their abilities.

4.     Forget traditional teaching – Social media should be used in collaboration to enhance traditional learning, not to replace traditional learning completely.

Starting with this article allows me to know where to begin. This gave me a good backbone before I make sure I’m ready for a social media site. I think at this point, my biggest concern would be the time aspect and trying to do too much. I’m not sure I would have ever considered that unless I read that article. I would have jumped on in with changing my journals to blogs or my assignment posts to a twitter page, but would that have been too much too soon? Would I be able to actively keep up the page so students don’t become disinterested? This article got me thinking, and I’m glad I have this insight to weigh in on before I take my next step.  

Looking back, looking ahead...

I always loved the idea of technology being used in education, but I was nervous and scared about what that meant for my lessons. I used some technology in my classes, but I will admit, it wasn’t enough.  I was definitely relying on some of the old fashion teaching styles. This always puzzled me, because I felt like a young teacher at the age of 25 and technology was something I’m familiar with. So, why wasn’t I as comfortable with technology for teaching as I was with technology in my daily lifestyle? This course really helped me open up my eyes to this question.

I think part of issue was that I worried about my students and their ability, with their special needs, to function using these new applications and resources. However, any time I brought something I learned from class to them, they picked up on it. It took practice and patience, but overall worth it now that we have new tools to use!

Borrowed from The Odyssey Online

As educators, we have so many resources literally at our fingertips while we’re typing away on computers, chromebooks, iPads, etc. Participating and educating myself throughout this course has provided me with an abundant amount of resources and encouraged me to take the step and try using them in my classroom.

After the research assignment where we looked up statistics and facts about where educators stand with education, I felt better about my nervous and fears. I learned that many other educators face those same challenges.  But what was I to be nervous about? My students won’t know if my lesson goes perfectly according to plan. Now I have the courage and information to try new technology.  I’m walking away with more insight on Padlet, Showbie, Quizlet, Thinglink,  NearPod, Prezi, and Screen Casting, just to name a few. That enough made this class worthwhile for me!

My favorite quote and overall lesson I will take from this course is when Nicole proposed the question of “would you want to be a student in your own classroom?” As educators, I think we can all come back to this question on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and it should motivate us to be better and do better for our students.

Personal Research Paper

Originally created by Scott Duke. 

This week’s blog post intrigued me. As a 25 year old, I was always told through high school and college that anything I put on the Internet was out there for everyone to see. The amount of times this phrase was repeated was endless, and I like to think I did a pretty good job of keeping my “digital footprint” safe. However, this project made me realize that my “digital tattoo” may be a little different. This is the information that is out there that maybe I wasn’t compiling or I wasn’t putting onto the web myself. This was information compiled through other databases, some that I had no idea of.

I don’t think I was scared about this project, because I understand the reality of our digital world, but I was curious to see how much I could find. I started with my most common search engine, Google, and then moved on to others such as PeekYou, Pipl, Radaris, Nuwber,  Spezify, BlockShopper, Social Mention, and People Finders. I know it said we had to use a minimum of seven resources, but I was so carried away and having fun that I think I tried them all. The ones listed above gave me the most information about myself.

First off, there were tons of pictures popping up. Old social media profile pictures, current social media profile pictures, a photo of me that I’m using on my professional website for this class, and even a picture of the yearbook page from my high school. I also found it interesting that when I Google image searched myself, a lot of pictures that popped up were not me, but people I worked with. I’m assuming this is because we share an online directory for our school and all of our photos are listed by our contact information. I was also associated with some of the pictures of our students doing activities around school  (raking leaves, grilling food, etc) that have been posted on the school’s website. See my screen shot below of some of the images that popped up!

Personal screenshot taken during my data mining. 

Other information that I came across was my address, age, and both my cell and home phone numbers. Nuwber even gave me a list of neighbors that lived near me. I glanced over the names and many of them I knew, but a few stuck out that I did not recognize. Why someone would need to associate me to my neighbors is interesting to me, especially because we have such a variety of age range.

Most of my family was listed as relatives on almost every site. I also saw that not only was it my parents and siblings, but my grandma’s name was always included as well. My grandma lived with us for many years so I’m assuming that is how they clumped her in with us. I was intrigued to see that my dad’s brother, his son, his son’s wife, and their children popped up a few times as “relatives.” This is interesting because my dad is one of ten and there are a ton of people who share our last name, so why they were the only ones to be associated I’m not sure. It may be that the live in a closer radius to us than the others?

My last fun fact that I came across through my data mining was that PeekYou actually listed a hobby for me as running. This took my back a bit. Yes, I enjoy running, but how would anyone know that?  I’m not even sure I would consider that my #1 hobby. Luckily, I ended my searching with another try at Google and exploring other pages. This lead me find that later on in my Google pages, there were a few articles of meets or results from cross country meets I participated in during high school, I can only assume this is where someone made up my running hobby!

Overall, this was a fun project and it was interesting to see the information that came across while researching myself!

2.0

Below is my screencast video to view my instruction on 3 different Web 2.0 tools!

Web 2.0 Examples

Well, I got a little carried away with this assignment and my screencast told me I was running out of time so I apologize for the quick exit at the end!

I thought this was a great assignment and fun to explore new web ideas! I ended up presenting on one new 2.0 tool, Quizlet, but then I also gave you a brief overview on two other tools, Moby Max and Kahoot. I'm going to talk a little bit about each of these below. It's similar information I stated in my video, but I know some people like to read when they learn, and some like to listen and watch, so whatever you prefer I hope you enjoy my 2.0 tools!

Quizlet -  This is an online learning tool that aides in study habits. Students can create their own study sets with definitions, questions, or facts. Teachers can also create a study set for the entire class and share it with their students so everyone is studying the same materials. You can use this as a review game and to improve study skills. Students learn by a variety of strategies such as flashcards, mini-quizzes, matching, writing, games, true false, multiple choice, and many more!

Moby Max - This tool is an online database that finds and fixes learning gaps with the power of personalized learning. Every student logged in to Moby Max is doing work at their appropriate grade level in each subject. Students love the fast pace and individualized learning. The features on Moby Max allow the most gifted students to progress as quickly as they can and those that need more help to receive extra instruction. Moby Max finds and fixes learning gaps across K-8 subjects of reading, math, language arts, writing, science, spelling, and phonetics. This website creates beautiful graphs and data for parents, teachers, and administrators to discuss. One of it's best features is that a student can be working on higher math and lower reading, each individual subject is set to that student's needs.

Kahoot - Kahoot is a game-based learning platform that makes learning fun! Teachers create a quiz on any topic and then students compete with one another in the class while playing the review game. My students love the bright colors, competitive nature, and easy to use features!