Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Social Media and the Classroom: New Frontiers in Applied Learning

One of our topics this week is social media and its applications to classroom learning. I was searching online for some sites to recommend. Here are some:

OnlineUniversities.com features this link that many ESL teachers will find to be useful: 100 Inspiring Ways to Use Social Media in the Classroom. 

Social Media Classroom is another site I recommend: The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools.  The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos.  The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it.  Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don’t want to install your own.

Speaking Up in Class, Silently, via Social Media is an interesting news article published this past May in the New York Times.

TechNewsDaily published a similar piece in May 2010 on the same subject: This represents a sea change for educators. Until recently, most schools banned students from using social media tools in the classroom. But progressive educators say this represents a major disconnect with the world that awaits them outside the school walls.  It's not protecting them today so much as handicapping them tomorrow.

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