So September is here and the kids are bustling through the hallways once again. I'm still in my early 30's, but the classroom of 2010 looks nothing like the classroom of my youth. Yes there are still rows of desks, bulletin boards, and textbooks. But now a smartboard is attached to the wall, a graphing calculator is attached to the projector, and my entire textbook is available online with some amazing interactive features. But is this enough? Are we really keeping up with the times in education? The answer, unfortunately is often, no. Many are set in their ways and embracing new things is difficult at any age.
As any good teacher does, I am constantly evaluating myself. At the end of each lesson, I keep a notebook of what can be done to improve or change each lesson for the following year. At the end of each year, I look for ways to add to my "toolbox" of pedagogical strategies to better serve my students. After a lot of great reading and some interesting talks with colleagues, I have decided to try to incorporate social media into my curriculum.
It is an ADD society we live in and its students are constantly being pulled in a million different directions. Between school, parents, sports, clubs, work, television, and the internet students are often multitasking and Mr. Waldstein's math homework is unfortunately going to be way down on the list of priorities. However, if we as teachers can enter that digital network with them, the material being taught can actually relate and fit in with their daily lives. Crazy Thought!
However, this idea is not without some major problems. Most schools (including my own) have filters that block facebook/twitter/myspace/etc making it difficult to make it a prominent part of any lesson. Facebook seems to be the site prominently used by my students so I was thinking of making a profile for homework assignments, educational links, and classroom calenders. However, facebook is a little too personal and I dont want to exchange pictures and hear about their personal thoughts. So I havedecided to get my feet wet in this endeavor with a twitter account. It is quick, to the point, and more impersonal. I dont see any need to ever use more than 140 characters to get my point across.
So I just created a twitter account for my teacher alter-ego, and am going to encourage my students to "follow" me. I will send tweet homework assignments, test-reminders, links to educational and ~educational stories that I think they will find interesting. This will be my starting point and I hope to expand this use in the upcoming weeks, months, and years.
Some awesome ideas that I have read about from other teachers of all subjects
*Create a facebook page about your favorite literary character.
*Field trips using Skype (You dont even have to leave the room!)
* Create a new iphone/droid/insert phone here ap related to the educational topic
* tweet famous speeches or conversations (it's the modern way to paraphrase)
It can also be used for extra collaboration between students, teachers, and parents; speaking to other educators and sharing ideas, create groups, and hundreds of other possible uses. I look forward to delving into this new pool of possibilities and excited for the positive impact I think it can have on my students.
Check out edmodo.com . It's a social network site specifically for schools, and it closely resembles facebook. Our media center will be using the site for the first time this year- hopefully it will be successful.
ReplyDeleteNice start to your blogging career Dave, for me it's the modern day answer to what we often talked about when we were younger...we were always awesome at remembering song lyrics verbatim hearing the song once or twice and often talked about if our teachers incorporated this into their lessons how we would ace every subject..
ReplyDeleteNice~! I agree w/the edmodo...we just started that in our school. Very very cool.
ReplyDeleteAs stated on facebook. My worry with the edmodo is that high school kids can already check our site to get updates/HW/grades. This will pop up with their regular social things, reminding them to do their work at times where they might have otherwise forgotten.
ReplyDeleteDave,
ReplyDeleteInteresting thoughts good luck with the new method of reaching your students any extra help a teacher can have can be a useful tool. You may want to check out polleverywhere.com we used it the other day. Basically we were asked a question and were able to text our response from our phones and the responses from the group came up in bar graph form on the screen. While your classes can most likely manage bar graphs already you may be able to think of something to do with it. Good Luck
John