Empowering Students with Web 2.0 and Social Media
What do today's students expect? They expect the C's of education... communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking.
Examine ISTE's National Educational Technology Standards for Students. The focus is on the students and how the technology supports their learning.
Safety is priority when using Web 2.0 and Social Media with Students. An effective way to educate your students and their parents is by using Net Cetera: Chatting with Kids About Being Online, available for PDF download. If you are doing a presentation about keeping kids safe online, you can order their Net Cetera Community Outreach Toolkit.
Tools used throughout the presentation are Twitter, QR Codes (with the QRReader), and PollEverywhere all of which can be used for active participation among your students.
Students want...
Reason
Support System
Freedom
Examine ISTE's National Educational Technology Standards for Students. The focus is on the students and how the technology supports their learning.
Safety is priority when using Web 2.0 and Social Media with Students. An effective way to educate your students and their parents is by using Net Cetera: Chatting with Kids About Being Online, available for PDF download. If you are doing a presentation about keeping kids safe online, you can order their Net Cetera Community Outreach Toolkit.
Tools used throughout the presentation are Twitter, QR Codes (with the QRReader), and PollEverywhere all of which can be used for active participation among your students.
Students want...
Reason
- They need an authentic audience or a relevance to what they are learning. Here's a blog that I wrote for Stenhouse's Blogstitute called Get Real! which gives several additional ways that you can give your students a reason to learn.
- Voice Thread is a great way for students to have a relevant reason to learn, create, and communicate within a standard. You can create an identity for each student under your account. In order for students to have a unique identity without giving away personal information, they can create avatars on Build Your Wild Self. Voice Thread is also available as an app.
Support System
- My students plan and collaborate with their 300 collaborative peers through Moodle. Ours is provided through the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. The students use the discussion boards for asynchronous conversations and the chat for heir synchronous planning. Students also upload files for their partners to have editing access. Becoming "Techknowledgeable" explains the success that a student can have with this type of support system.
- Skype allows a user to make a free video call. Here are some authors who skype with classes and book clubs for free. See my "Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing?" page for additional Skype resources. Want to start doing "mystery Sype" with your class? Here's a list of educators with whom you can connect.
- The Twitter hashtags that my students joined were #WhyIWrite and #GRA13 (Global Read Aloud). Not sure about how Twitter works? Here's a blog where I explained the basics of Twitter. Interested in connecting your class with other classes from around the world through Twitter? Join The GlobalClassTwitter wiki. In addition a variety of topic conversations and connections my students have with other students, we've done Twitter Style Book Reviews. Uncomfortable using Twitter? Try Twiducate. Want to connect your students with a scientist? Here are 100 Scientists on Twitter by Category.
- Blogging makes writing an interactive conversation. My students have replaced several of our mandated, static assignment with the blog. Here's an example. We use KidBlog. If you are on Twitter and you would like for your students to have comments, you can add #comments4kids to your request and fellow educators and students will comment upon them. Quadblogging is another way to connect your students to other students bloggers from around the world.
- With TripWow, your students can create a virtual field trip for others. My students created one for their collaborative writing partners using photos from our trip to Moundville Archaeological Park and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
- Using Picasa Web Albums and Image Loop (an app), learners can create and collection of images in a slideshow to share with others. Here is a Picasa Web Album that my students created to share our Innovation Day with their peers worldwide and an image loop they created to teach their collaborative writing peers about Alabama Animals during a hands-on activity we had at school.
- Comic Book! is an app where students can easily turn photos into comic book pages. A web tool that is almost identical is Comic Life which requires a download to your computer.
- Museum Box is a tool that students can use to build a "box" of different media (text, video, images, sound)on a particular subject. Registration approval takes about 5 days. Here is an example of one that my students created: Science is Everywhere. For an explanation of how we use it in our classroom you can read Creating Curators of Content with Museum Box.
- Capzles Social Storytelling tool enables users to create interactive timelines with video, urls, music and documents.
Freedom
- To create a site to showcase multiple types of project, your learners can publish on Weebly for Education.The spontanous project that my students created to support what they were reading is here: There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom. Here's a description of this specific project. They used Voki, Voice Thread, ProProfs, Wordle, and ToonDoo. Here's an explanation of how we use Voki in the Classoom: Speaking of Motivating Students.
Please stay in touch. I would love to continue these conversations. You can follow me on my blog at [email protected], on Twitter and Instagram @juliedramsay or on my Facebook author/educator page, Julie D. Ramsay.