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Personally, I LOVE social media. I use it mostly for my everyday life, but it is a huge part of my teaching life as well. For teaching, I rely mostly on twitter, where I can connect with educators that I know, and ones that I don'y know.
On the other hand.... social media is different with my students. They are only in 4th grade, and I don't think it is OK, or necessary, for them to have any sort of social media account. I value digital citizenship in my classroom, and it is pushed by our school district. k-5 at my school are taught different lessons on how to be a good digital citizen. Before I can go any further with social media use in my classroom, I must first decide whether my students have a good understanding of what it means to be a good citizen, as well as a good digital citizen. I have social media in my classroom, first, by having a "twitter wall" (students could write up 'posts' with their favorite hashtags), a "facebook wall" (students could write 'statuses' as people from history, and could 'like' others' posts with a thumbs up clothespin), as well as an "instagram wall" (students could draw vocabulary pictures, and could 'like' others photos with a heart clothespin). This was a great way for me to introduce social media into my class (as well as the possible dangers), without having to get parents to sign a permission slip, or be worried about what my students might do. In the future, I hope to use an idea from another student in this master's program. Serina mentioned that she follows people on twitter (ex: astronaut), and shares his posts each morning. in addition, I would love for students to create tweets for our class twitter, but they must go through me before I will post them. Overall, I love social media, but my 4th graders are a bit too young :(
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One tool that I currently use is Blendspace. Just in case you haven't heard of it - it is a GREAT tool to share specific videos, links, photos, etc. with your students. For me, this has been a wonderful alternative to letting my 4th graders roam the internet, "researching" different topics. I'm always SO nervous with what my students might stumble upon on the internet, so I like to use Blendspace to guide them.
Blendspace is VERY user friendly, and it will take only MINUTES to set one up. I cannot even tell you how long "Try out Blendspace" was on my "To Do list" before I actuall y tried it. Once I did, I immediately regretted not trying it sooner. It was so easy and fast! There are ways to search for things to include on your Blendspace right from the site. The results are a safe, equal researching grounds for all of my kiddos. I really can't stress how quickly you can make one of your own. Win-win for me and my students :) In addition, my colleagues and I have recently learned how to collaborate on Blendspace. We create them for almost all subjects (and specific topics within subjects) in order to help our students learn and research. Blendspace is also somehow linked with Google, so adding it to a google classroom is a breeze! I LOVE being able to use the same Blendspaces year after year, but continuing to add to them, to keep making them better and better!!! I can definitely see how my Blendspaces have improved each time I do it. Here is an example Blendspace: https://www.tes.com/lessons/tH6eWd9uUhmgYg/great-depression My students used this to research the Great Depression. It includes videos, photos, as well as website links (for sites that are student friendly). |
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