Communicating and Collaborating with Social Media
While reading the first section of Chapter 8, I had to think about how tremendous teaching with the help of technology changed over the last couple of years. When I went to school, teachers used worksheets, a chalkboard, communication notebooks for parents and in really early times handwritten and photocopied activity sheets. Now I read in "Electronic Communication between Teachers and Students" that much of the communication with teachers happen electronically. The teachers are able to create a classroom website with information and homework while in earlier days the homework and class information was written on a sideboard to copy at the beginning of each class or supposed to be copied in a notebook by the end of the class' conclusion for the day. I think classroom websites and information pages are a good thing. Students have all their information they need together and the parents are able to get all the important information at one click that they might miss without that website. The book suggests to establish an online discussion group. This is also a nice idea for teachers to let parents and students get information and answers to questions quicker than before. It might help students to improve their work and get better grades.
Another section of the book I like to talk about is "Social networking for educators". According to the book, sociologist Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman noted that a social network is a "set of relations among network members". The book describes that individuals share information and profiles by textmessaging, chatting or blogging and participating in online communities. Also it says that Teachers are engaging in educational networking. This involves teachers who use social networking technology for educational and professional development.
When I am planning for our next lesson plan, I mainly use search engines like google to find material. Most of the material I find on the Pinterest. This is a website were people post ideas and information for other people to share and try out. I found out many teachers and educators post ideas and activities on pinterest for other teachers to use. Some of my science fun activities and monthly theme activities came from ideas on pinterest. I also heard that our school has a pinterest account and posts our projects with pictures from time to time.
The next section I would like to talk about is "Integrating Electronic Communications into your Teaching." The book points out "Sharing information with Families" and I think this is a very important point since parents should be integrated in their children's school day and special happenings that will be going on around the school. According to the book, researchers from the Havard University Family Research project found that more than one in three families use the Internet to communicate with schools. Those families tended to have high incomes, more education, and greater access to computers. A positive connection was found between internet based family communication and higher academic achievement and expectations among twelve grade students. How internet based family school communication helps student achievement is not completely clear but researchers believe that the availability of online information may promote greater family involvement in student learning. Like I said, I think it is very important for families to get involved in their childrens' school days. Our school just gave the parents an opportunity to come to school and talked to the VPK teachers about their children's efforts in learning. This gives the parents the chance to listen about strengths and weaknesses of their children and work with the teacher together to help the child improve academically. I think, information for parents in general can help keep up a child's success, no matter of it is modern and electronically or traditional. The book also says that as a teacher, it makes sense to provide information to families about class assignments, grading policies upcoming activities and other topics online in a easily updatable format. I agree with that, parents have a right to know every detail of their childs school life. Our preschool has created a Facebook information page for parents and other family members to get information from. Our director maintains the Facebook page. The teachers have the opportunity to send her pictures about projects and activities and special events in their classrooms and she will post and share this information on the Facebook page. The parents have the opportunity to communicate with her and with each other and can be able to see that their children had fun in our special events or seasonal special projects. The book also points out a section called "Publishing students work". The book says Every year dance performances and art exhibitions and similar performing art project great interest in students. I agree, after students work hard on projects or performing arts, showing and displaying them to parents make them feel proud and enhances their self esteem. Our children plan and establish a Christmas program with songs and short poems every year for their parents. This event makes them feel special and proud. This year, we had some videos and pictures with information about each classes program posted on our facebook page. The parents were happy to see this pictures and videos. This created a lot of feedback and communication through the page.
Freitag, Julia (2015) Communication Technology + Learning, retrieved from www.linoit.com
Public Domain TV (2014) Amazing Science- Social Media in the Classroom: Forget Textbooks! Use Twitter! retrieved from youtube.com
It is good to hear that your school is leveraging Facebook and Pinterest as social media to keep communication lines open among teachers, parents, and administrators. They are fabulous tools for sharing information and more current than a traditional newsletter, etc. Thinking about how far social media has come in the last few years is pretty phenomenal and it also means we need to continue to keep our eyes out for other new tools that we don't even know we need (ha!) in the future.
ReplyDeleteI like that you created a Lino, too! Experimenting with all of these new tools gives you foundation for determining what needs to be in your 'toolbox' for your future classroom. Not everything has applicability, but you won't know unless you try it. Nice job