I have not seen too many teachers use social media around this area, none of my CTs did during my placements. I thought that John gave a good talk, he a really good reasons on why to use social media in the classroom. I see potential for it in my classes. The only issue I would have with it is putting in time to make it useful, I have seen many blogs that have just stopped with the last post being in 2009. I did find a directory for all science and math Edublogs:
http://edublogs.org/blog-directory/directorymathandscience/
It does have some useful things.
What are your thoughts of using social media in your classes?
I think that social media in the classroom is a wonderful idea. If done correctly, the teacher would only have to complete a startup site, the students can become the "upkeepers." The biggest problem I see, is school divisions blocking out social media websites.
ReplyDeleteI'd have to agree with you Andrew, a lot of blogs just aren't updated frequently enough, at least the ones we need to look at. Keeping a blog updated is a lot of work, probably around 1 hour a day if you want to keep it interesting. People will stop coming if you don't update regularly. Same goes for students I think, unless you give them a mark for going and posting to a class blog.
ReplyDeleteI see a lot of potential for blogs in the class, but students really need to have access to computers and broadband connections, which in small towns not everyone has (like in souris as my experience was)