Using Social and Online Networks in Teaching or in Professional Development

Using Social Online Networks in Teaching or Professional Development

I mistakenly thought that social media was just apps, websites or platforms like Facebook and Twitter where people communicate personal information with each other. Because I don’t use any of these, I assumed that I wouldn’t be using any social media in my teaching. But…

the dictionary.com states that social media are websites and apps that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.

So I realised that my students and I are using a wide range of social media to communicate  information, ideas and opinions with others and get response including feedback.

Google apps such as shared Google docs, Google forms and presentations are a type of social media that we use on a daily basis. They are great for ‘brain-pooling‘ ideas where everyone contributing can do so at the same time. We have to be mindful of the contributions others are making and connect our own ideas. This can ‘spark’ thinking and draw out relevant prior knowledge. An awesome benefit is that we don’t have to be near each other to collaborate.

The analysis and synthesis of this information leads to some really clever thinking. A challenge is when contributors delete information or change others. This seldom happens for us as they value the communication.

We now do not enable our students to use Google Hangout as they were ‘chatting’ about things that were not related to their learning both at home and at school and were also communicating with others who were sitting near them. This could have been a good for them to collaborate on their learning at home. We did have a thought about using it to share administrative notices in the morning with the whole school and may try this idea next year.

We all access websites to support our learning across all learning areas. We are good at choosing appropriate websites and are becoming much more critical about the information and ideas we locate. This is an ongoing challenge as we still need to understand that websites have information that may or may not be  true.‘Googling it’ is something we do regularly to access the knowledge we need to support the exploration we are engaged in.

We use blogs to reflect on our learning using learning stories. These include examples of our learning or the evidence to back up our reflections (eg a piece of writing or a student reading captured on a screen castify). We insert screen castifies, photos,  videos,  and podcasts into our blog posts. The blogs are shared with peers, other students in the school, teachers whanau/aiga and others who give feedback. These are an awesome record of learning and are a hugely significant way for students to share their strengths, next steps. We are ‘blown away’ by the thoughtful reflections that the students write and suspect that this is because their posts are shared through a type of social networking. At the moment the challenge that we are facing is engaging families in their child’s learning by getting them to give feedback on their child’s blog. We are trying to make sure that comments on blogs from family members are something that has to happen.

The use of you tube by students has loads of potential for learning and also sharing but is also fraught with problems. Eg The students who wrote a poi and created the music and actions for it uploaded the poi video they had created to youtube. The challenges are that we can’t control the content of the youtube clips that students watch.

Some of our students also use Wattpad to read and write with at home. They love being able to choose online texts that interest them and some of them publish their writing on Whattpad. The challenge that we all face is that Whattpad is like a huge library with no restrictions on what you can read. We talk to the students about letting their parents know what they are accessing on this site.

We all use the different Corinna School portals to access and communicate information we need to be prepared for upcoming events (Students use the student portal and staff use the staff portal). The students are awesome at updating their portal and we are not too bad. We are also reliant on the Mindlab portal for the same purpose.

Some other social media that I use are webinars and TED talks for professional development, Survey Monkey to communicate and collect  information and ideas, the Unitec  Moodle to access information to support our professional learning and Google Plus for professional discussions.

There are huge benefits for us when using social media as a tool to enhance our learning. This is especially the case when the tool enables us to make learning transformational. According to Simsek (2012) transformational learning is the process of deep, constructive, and meaningful learning that goes beyond simple knowledge acquisition.

Many of the challenges are around inappropriate use of the tool, or not extending it’s use to it’s full potential.