Week 4 Activity 14: Online Conferences

Leveraging the power of social media in the classroom-

Social Media in the classroom - to get specific ideas on how to make fake facebook, twitter, and pinterest walls for effective student engagement watch this!

The premise for this video is that social media in the classroom engages students and effectively tells a story that students can understand and teachers should harness and guide students to learn about themselves and others online. I believe that  I was pretty transparent in my earlier posts that I have a lot of nervousness about social media, especially in the classroom. This video begins by citing, "students spend on average 2 hours and 20 minutes online each day and 80% of that is social media." Naturally, that raises the question of how we can incorporate, rather than shy away from, this learning opportunity into our lessons. What was surprising is the presenter states that students are more likely to believe what they read on Twitter feeds versus newspaper media print, and she adds " if they even read it" - referring to the newsprint.

When I watched this video, and I took a lot of notes while doing so, I learned specific and safe methods to use social media and networking in the classroom. It is true that colleges, jobs, coaches, and others are performing  facebook and google searches to discover the type of person being considered for recruitment. Watch the video or follow this link to discover very specific and effective ways to use the ideas of Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest in any classroom. I will use these types of social media networks for historical timelines of scientists responsible for developing both the Cell Theory in Biology and Atomic Model in Chemistry. After-all, the presenter made a great point, you can give a student a textbook to find information OR you can assign them a task to create a blank Facebook page and ask them to fill it in.

 SPEAK UP! Transforming Classroom Discussions

Classroom Discussions - to learn more about face to face versus virtual discussions click on this link or see video below

The question posed in this presentation is, " in what ways can we encourage more students to engage in classroom discussions?"  This was interesting to me because only six years prior I asked this question as part of an action-research inquiry. After watching this video it has became clear to me that the answers to this question have grown beyond the Fishbowl discussion methods that I formerly used during the genetic engineering unit in biology class.

In this video, I discovered that students participated more and stayed more on topic in virtual discussions. It is explained that,  "the females are freed from the constraints of whole class discussions and males are less likely to react without thinking," during the virtual experience. The argument for face-to-face discussions is that they are more authentic and real. Interestingly, however, the virtual has longer lasting repercussions so the theory is that all students, not just the male population, think more about their response and the resulting quality of discussion is greater. I plan to experiment with my classes over time and find which method works best for the culture within my classroom as it too is dynamic. Here is a summary of virtual discussion tools that the presenter assures are user-friendly tools for classroom collaboration-
wordpress, inoodle, titanpad, today's meet, twitter, & google-drive for live chat and discussion.