Leah's Blog

I enjoyed reading Dr. Dennen's Instructional Design and Development for Social Media Lessons paper to start off the week. She describes in detail how she uses social media tools in her lessons and how she designs her process.  One of the sections I found most important was the information on providing tutorials. Dr. Dennen gives a couple examples of how students struggled with tools before being provided with a tutorial. While not all tools will require a tutorial, I think it's important to consider them for tools that might have a confusing interface. For each of the tools I've explored, I've looked up reference guides to determine how to best use the different features. While I didn't feel like I needed hand holding throughout my exploration of tools, the tutorials definitely helped me better understand how to effectively use the tools.  I've also experienced difficulties with certain tools in my classroom because I didn't provide tutorials at first. I'

This past weekend I participated in the Detox Challenge. The challenge was to stay off of social media for 24-48 hours. I finished all my classwork by Friday and took Saturday to attempt the challenge. I was successful and stayed off of all social media for about 36 hours. I didn't really find it difficult to remove myself, but I did find my thumb hovering over the Facebook app on my phone every time I unlocked it. I definitely had to actively think about not tapping that Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter button because it is habit for me to click and browse when I'm bored. The hardest part was missing out on what was going on that day. I actually missed one of my good friend's birthdays because I rely on Facebook to remind me and I wasn't on that day to see the notification. I felt horrible! This is similar to the way I felt when I took a month long hiatus from social media in the past. I missed out on important dates, dogs passing, baby announcements, and more. Most peo

This week I tried out two writing and publishing tools, one group annotation tool, and one concept mapping tool. Stories for School, Framapad, Hypothesis, and Bubbl.us weren't all that self explanatory when I first joined them, so I had to do some additional research to determine how these tools are used. Here's what I found. Stories for School Stories for School allows students to read and write interactive fiction through branching stories or choose your own adventure texts. The app allows teachers to communicate with their students writing throughout the process. Interactive fiction requires writers to think about different scenarios, paths, and links between story chapters. The stories can also be illustrated with different images. I like the idea of this app but didn't really get a good idea of how it worked. The website says students can easily create accounts without email addresses so I think this is a benefit in the classroom. I'd be interested to see this tool

This weekend I participated in the Goodreads challenge. I have never used Goodreads other than when I've come across a summary or review of a book I've looked up. I liked how easy it was to post to the discussion and it got me thinking about how you could use Goodreads in the classroom. 1. Invite students to keep track of their books Students can easily add books to their "read" bookshelf and add books they're interested in reading to their "to read" bookshelf. 2. Connect with authors Students can follow their favorite authors, track what they're reading, and get notifications when they post to blogs. 3. Find recommendations You can have your students request a recommendation for a certain genre or suggest books to other classmates. 4. Create private discussion groups You can extend book discussions outside of the classroom by posting to a private discussion group. Students can then respond to each other within the Goodreads platform. You can also po

Joining two separate communities and being an active participant in one while lurking in the other was very interesting. I first joined two adoption related groups, one on Facebook and one on Reddit. I quickly became overwhelmed in both of these groups because of the controversial topics brought up. I actively participated in the Facebook group and shared my ideas and thoughts with total strangers. Still, there was a sense of community among that group. People mostly supported each other and had great advice to give. However, there were times when things got out of hand in that group. If anyone disagreed with someone else's opinion, things got pretty heated and admins had to disable comments. I didn't experience the same thing in the Reddit group. There was a lower sense of community in that group because people hid behind their handles and didn't really get to know one another. I found myself really wanting to comment on certain topics but I was just there to lurk. Eventua

Diigo is an excellent social bookmarking tool that enables you to save, annotate, and share bookmarks. There is a special account for K-12 and higher-ed educators that give registered teachers a variety of tools and features. You can create a student Diigo group for your class without the use of student emails. You can also set privacy settings to the group so that only members can see content. Besides using Diigo groups to share with your students websites and content you find on the web, students can also use it for collaboration on research projects, group bookmarks, and annotation. Here are some ways you can use Diigo group to conduct research in and out of class: Students can search for online content relevant to a research project and bookmark the websites they find and add them to the class group. Students can organize bookmarks by tags and date to aggregate content around a particular topic and make it easier to search for later. Students can highlight specific parts on the boo

I was thinking about a topic on the discussion board this week regarding ethics and using social media in the classroom. I wrote about how I think using social media in the classroom can be problematic, but I started to think about the ways social media can be useful in the classroom. Maybe not for elementary or middle school, but it might work for high schoolers. After all, when you think about the favorite activity of today's students you'll probably come up with the obvious answer: social media.  Students learn plenty of new things everyday but they rarely get precise instructions on how to use social media. Instead, they rely on what they see from other users and this doesn't always lead them in the right direction. However, the teacher can set an example and explain how social media can help them learn and establish a great online reputation. Here are some ways social media can be used in the classroom: 1. Connect the class in a Facebook group. Create a private group a