Social Media in the Classroom

One thing that my Educational Technology Cohort is really teaching me is the value of Social Media.  I have definitely valued social media in my own personal life, but hadn't thought of all the things that it could do in my teaching.  I read a few articles about this idea, and realize that the sky is the limit where Social Media is concerned.

The first article I read had to do with teachers in the arts.  For visual and music arts, there are many different uses for social media that could be explored in my classroom.  With regards to composing, there are so many different applications and sites that can help students create songs.  Students can then post their songs and creations on a website for feedback from peers and for instant feedback from the teacher.  One of the greatest things that came out of this article though, was the idea of social media as help for the arts teachers to connect.  Often times, the music teacher or art teacher is the only of its kind in a building.  This makes it hard to collaborate with others and come up with new, fresh ideas for your teaching.  The article talks about Nings, blogs, and even Facebook to connect with other teachers.  Pinterest is another social networking tool not mentioned in the article but very useful for other teachers to collaborate as well.

The second article I read was about bringing social networking into the classroom.  The main idea of the article talked about how students and parents use social media so often in their personal lives that it is second nature to them.  Why then, aren't we using this in our classrooms and our schools?  Some projects mentioned included students blogging about a trip they took and using Skype to contact schools in another country for a project.  The Skype project had a class communicating and had different jobs for each child, including photographer, secretary, tweeters, and fact checkers.  It was a great way to engage students in plenty of different ways.  Another idea that came up was a project that involved smart phones and ways for students to post questions or comments about homework.  Educators didn't think that it would work, but then when they posted a question about linear equations, they had 75 students create videos to help their peers.  This article also brings up the idea of Professional Development by talking about the Twitter hash tag #edchat and all the comments and ideas that come from that for teachers.

Social Media is really transforming the world in many ways, so teachers need to jump onto the train.  We need to be using different sites for our own Professional Development and also using different Social Media to engage our students in the classroom.  With more training and more time to explore, the classroom can extend its boundaries to the home and beyond so students can become more engaged.

Ash, K. (2011). Art and music learning emphasize interactivity, real-world relevance. Education Week, 30(35), S12-S14.

Davis, M. (2010). Social networking goes to school. Education Digest: Essential Readings Condensed for Quick Review, 76(3), 14-19.

RSA #3

Preservice teachers and inservice teachers may have never heard of the term "C3" before, which is becoming a very serious problem when talking about the integration of technology in the classroom at any level.  C3 stands for cyberethics, cybersafety, and cybersecurity.  These three outline the risks to technology and the internet that teachers need to be aware of.  Cyberethics refers to how someone conducts themselves online through comments and also includes plagarising.  Cybersafety includes the knowledge of internet prowlers and how to minimize exposure to things that can be harmful to a computer or its user. Cybersecurity is the technical aspect of everything including accurate virus protection and firewalls that protect users.  In the research, it was found that most teachers were unaware of these threats and only were confident in teaching about a few of these.  One of the main points that the article brings up is that the teachers that are coming out of colleges are primarily what are called "digital natives" and have grown up with technology all their lives.  However, in the majority of cases, these "digital natives" didn't know much more than those termed "digital immigrants", who grew up in an age where computers were not available at all times.  One of the last complications brought up was the fact that no matter what, the content of C3 is always changing.

It was very interesting to read this article only because it made me think a great deal about the teachers in my own building.  I remember a few teachers that got viruses on their computers because they clicked on a wrong button when it popped up or thought that a site was okay when it wasn't.  It was because they didn't know what to look for.  If the teachers don't know what to look for, then the kids certainly don't know what to look for.  In the article it mentions several different parts of C3 that teachers should learn about and talks also about who the responsibility lies with.  Many beleive that this should be the responsibility of the parent, and with some cases, I do agree.  We are not going to be using a child's cell phone in the classroom, so parents are in charge of setting the boundaries on its use.  If we are using wikispaces or blogger in the classroom though, I feel that it is in fact my job as an educator to teach the students what is and isn't okay to do online.  Overall, it was a very interesting article that brought up a lot of good points.

Pusey, P., & Sadera, W. A. (2011). Cyberethics, cybersafety, and cybersecurity: Preservice teacher knowledge, preparedness, and the need for teacher education to make a difference. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 28(2), 82-88.

RSA #2

     Connectivism is a proposed theory set out by Siemens in 2004.  In the article "Connectivism: Its Place in Theory-Informed Research and Innovation in Technology-Enabled Learning" put out by Frances Bell, connectivism is discussed put into a category of phenomenon rather than theory.  The article states that knowledge is a commodity and more and more is becoming a social activity itself with the sharing and refining of ideas over the internet.  The internet and social media is now changing education and knowledge because it is now residing in what is called a non-human appliance, where previously it was only held in networks of humans.  Goodyear and Castells, as discussed in Bell's article put forth the idea that past learning theories are not providing an adequate framework for us to think and act in this new digital and connected world.  That being said, there need to be additional theories to explain the changes, plan interventions, and develop policy.  This is where Siemens proposed connectivism.

     George Siemens claims that connectivism should be thought of as a successor to behaviorism, cognitivism, and contructivism.  He describes limitations of each being the intrapersonal view of learning, failure to address learning withing technology and organizations, and lack of contribution to the value judgments that need to be made in knowledge-rich environments.  Branching of the chaos theory, connectivism talks extensively about networks, defining them as connections between entities.  These entities can be people, groups, systems, fields, ideas, or communities.  Some principles of the theory include: learning residing in non-human appliances, learning being a process of connecting specialized entities, and accurate and up-to-date knowledge is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.  In this theory, he does not specifically address technology but does elude to it in the idea of non-human appliances.  Siemens theory was something widely spread when it was introduced, but has failed to make a significant impact in scholarly publishing.

     The author suggests then that connectivism is not a theory but a phenomenon that is making most of its impact at the level of curriculum.  There needs to be more research and elaboration to go beyond just that.  In the articles conclusion it presents a few different scenarios that could eventually lead to the development of more theories relating to this ever-expanding technology integration.

     I enjoyed the very scholarly article, but found myself wanting a better explanation of just what Siemens set out to say with his theory.  With the exception of the addition of non-human appliances, I feel that the theory was not bringing anything new to the educational "table".  My favorite part of the article was actually in one of the proposed scenarios of study.  Researches in the UK are trying to use social media for informal learning and describes innofusion and domestication with technology.  Innofusion is innovation that happens at the site of use, and domestication is where the consumer innovates by using the artifact in ways not anticipated by the designer.  With regards to what we were discussing today, I feel like the domestication is what we are striving for... this idea of presenting something to kids and having them create their own knowledge from it and create something totally unexpected while learning.  It was interesting to see that this infant theory was working towards that as well.

Bell, F. (2011). Connectivism: Its place in theory-informed research and innovation in technology-enabled learning. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(3), 98-118.

RSA #1

       HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking, puts forth the idea of using blogs in the language arts classroom and follows one educator's journey in implementing them with her fifth grade class.  The teacher began her blog as a reading response blog in which she would post a discussion and children had to post their responses.  After her students' waning interest she posted the question about what they could do to use the blog in other ways.  We find out that in response to her students answer to what they would like to use the blog for, she allowed for students to post different work on the blog, post their own sets of questions, and even work to bring in outside literature they were excited about.

       The article describes what a weblog or "blog" is in general and goes on to say that the Internet is this generation's most important technology for literacy.  Each aspect of the Internet requires new skills that the schools need to prepare students for including collaboration, problem solving on the Internet, and communicating safely on the Internet.  Classroom news blogs, mirror blogs, showcase blogs, and literature response blogs were the four types of blogs the author mentioned as being used most often.  

       After outlining the steps for best going about creating a blog, the steps for HOT blogging became the focus.  Beginning with the idea of bolstering the background the teacher posts activities and questions that help students build their background knowledge of the chosen subject.  After building background knowledge, teachers "prime the pump" by inviting students to share their thinking, including confusions, summaries of what they learned so far, and self connections.  The goal of this is to give other students an opportunity to read and then prepare themselves for conversation.  Next, the teacher facilitates continuing the conversation by having students synthesize their knowledge gained from multiple texts including their background research, other student comments, and the direct text they are studying.  Lastly, the teacher directs students to read, think, and comment on the blog.  All of these steps work together to promote a higher level of thinking.

       Overall, I felt this was a very interesting article.  I liked the personal aspect of it, bringing in a teacher who was just learning about how to use blogging in her own classroom.  She got frustrated at first, because students were starting to lose interest.  After asking them how they thought they could use the blog, she was able to provide other opportunities for learning by incorporating their ideas.  This idea of asking the children what they want out of it is in itself a higher order thinking that I appreciated.  In my own teaching I often allow for this constructivist practice, giving students access to materials and giving them a task such as making up their own game to learn note names.  The results of this are better than anything that I could come up with on my own.  This makes me believe that students want to be encouraged in this way.  They want to be given the opportunity to respond to each other and to the teacher in their own comfort zone, which is often using technology.  The steps outlined in this article were helpful in that it lays out a practical way to apply it to your own teaching, but outlines a very vigorous first attempt at blogging.  I feel like a first time blogger would be better off using blogs in one of the four ways mentioned first, like a classroom news blog before getting into something as deep as this higher order of thinking framework.

Zawilinski, L. (2009). Hot blogging: A framework for blogging to promote higher order thinking. The Reading Teacher, 62(8), 650-661.

Article 3 Review

And now I'm back with a review on social media in education!


The article starts with talking about how social media is taking its place in education, and with it comes a whole new set of interesting programs and interesting challenges.  It talks about the idea of bullying becoming cyber bullying, note passing becoming sexting and social media being a potentially huge liability.  However, it goes off to say then that even though these challenges exist, if schools nurture this great responsibility, the social media resources will be great.  Then there was a list of different social media platforms that educators can look into: Edmodo, SchoolTube, Glogster, Collaborize Classroom, EDU 2.0, Kidblog.org, Edublogs, Nin, Elluminate, SurveyMonkey, and other blogs and wikis.  The last thing that is mentioned is that social media in education is something that teachers have to just jump into to experience it for themselves.


The article was interesting because of the different tools that the author mentions and also interesting in the fact that he brings up the very serious issue that a lot of us have brought up before.  What about the privacy factor.  How are we going to protect our students?  Then it talks about how if we really examine this responsibility and nurture the idea of it, then we can use it.  I think that it is important that we talk about putting all of these things into perspective and think about every major thing that has happened with technology and/or education.  Each new trend has met resistance and had to have a set of expectations and rules that went along with it.  Every time we have succeeded in rising to these new expectations and working through the challenges.


Rivero, V. (2011, June). We're talking social media in education. Internet@Schools, 18(3), 12-15.

Article Review #1

One of the things that we are supposed to do for this class is to research different topics in technology.  Of course I chose to find the articles that also relate to music.  Here is the first of those articles that I found interesting.

Instructional Blogging in the General Music Room, written by K. Kerstetter was an interesting article that talked about the shift of general music classrooms from sing alongs and record listening to something entirely different.  With technology, music itself has changed so much that the music classroom has digital streaming, document cameras to look at music, SMART boards, and a whole other host of things.  The best analogy that I've seen explains that the teachers of yesterday and even some of today are kind of visitors of this new environment, where the students are the "digital natives".  They already speak the language and we need to get on board with that.  There are several music teachers who have jumped on this idea though and have really shown what technology can do in the classroom.  These are professional blogs that are put out to further our profession, but the idea of blogging in the classroom is coming to be common as well.  The article gave a number of examples of ways to use blogs in the classroom including, a listening log, evaluating music, "voting" on awards like the Grammys, sharing personal music experiences, and having students reflect of class happenings.  It goes on to also mention the classroom theories behind the idea of blogging, talking about Vygotsky's theory of learning.  With blogging, it follows the idea of the student's learning increasing when given the opportunity to learn on their own with just assistance from a peer or adult.  Another educational theorist, Lipman, then talked about the social component of learning where blogs are allowing students to listening to each other, build on their ideas, and challenge each other in different ways.

I felt that the article was very informative and helped me understand the ways that I can validate blogging.  In the music classroom, this would give students an extra opportunity to write and communicate that I don't have the time to do in two thirty minute sessions.  The ideas that the article provided for different ways to use blogs was also very helpful.  Going forward, I know that I want to let my students do these things, but worry about  the legalities and the technicalities of doing so.  When I sit down and really think about all that the kids can do, and drawing from personal experience at using things like WikiSpaces in the past, I know that they would love it.  This is going to be a goal for me this year definitely, getting the kids online and discussing with each other and me digitally.

Kerstetter, K. (2010). Instructional blogging in the general music room. General Music Today, 24(1), 15-18. doi: 10.1177/1048371310362516