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Social media for schools: a guide to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest

Social media for schools: a guide to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest
• For advice on e-safety in schools, click here The use of social media in education continues to be something of a hot topic with arguments both for and against. So I carried out a small survey of 27 teaching professionals in order to create a baseline of understanding into the use (or not) of social networking in schools, and also any concerns over some of the e-safety risks. The full survey results can be found here. There are many uses of social media in education - below are just a few of the ways they can be effectively used. Facebook • Using Facebook as a 'broadcast' account. Inspiration: University of Gloucestershire - This is a Facebook Page from my old university. Cambridge University - Another good example. Twitter • Twitter, like Facebook, is also being used as a broadcast account. Risca Community Comprehensive - A great example of an active school Twitter feed. Clevedon School - Another great example of an active feed. iClevedon - This is an account from the Clevedon again.

The Hierarchy of Professional Development Needs « It’s July and we are learning. A month usually reserved for family trips and “honey-do” lists has brought something different for our district: professional development. The fact that we are doing professional development in July, while unique to us, isn’t a new concept in educational training. However, what makes this professional development different is that rather than having the usual amount of no-shows or malcontents, we are over-capacity with enthusiasm. And more want to come. Did I mention this is a 3-day training? What makes teachers want to take a break from a beach trips or finally tiling that living room floor? For the second time this summer myself and fellow trainer Tim Yenca have embarked teachers on a 3-day learning expedition called the “Eanes Apple Core Academy”. 1. Yes, at the academy we celebrate failure so much that when it happens everyone cheers “Woooo!!” 2. 3. This one takes the most amount of work, but has some of the biggest pay-off. 4. Feed me maybe? 5.

Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge - Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice In a new book, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, the authors offer a practical guide to making knowledge work inside an organization. In this excerpt, the authors detail seven design principles for cultivating communities, everything from "design for evolution" to "combine familiarly and excitement." by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder Seven principles for cultivating communities of practice In Silicon Valley, a community of circuit designers meets for a lively debate about the merits of two different designs developed by one of the participants. Because communities of practice are voluntary, what makes them successful over time is their ability to generate enough excitement, relevance, and value to attract and engage members. How do you design for aliveness? Design for evolution. 1. The dynamic nature of communities is key to their evolution. 2. 3. A large portion of community members are peripheral and rarely participate. 4.

Leaders Leading iPad Programs I can across this article today from EmergingEdTech and it immediately resonated with me. We have been struggling with this exact situation in schools in our own region. Whenever you talk to teachers, especially those that have some first hand experience of iPad use in the classroom, this is one of the first things they say to you. Real change in schools needs to come from the top. Five Digital Literacy Professional Development Strategies Professional Development | Feature Five Digital Literacy Professional Development Strategies By Bridget McCrea08/07/12 Discussing digital literacy as a way to locate, understand, organize, evaluate, and create information using digital technology is one thing, but putting the concept into motion in the college classroom isn’t always easy. Here are five simple professional development strategies that schools can use to help faculty effectively teach and use digital literacy in today’s classroom: First, discard all assumptions about the "digital natives." About the Author Bridget McCrea is a business and technology writer in Clearwater, FL.

Stealth mentoring I was looking for any previous post I’d made about stealth mentoring, so I could refer to it in a post I was writing, and I couldn’t find it. It’s a concept I refer to often (and have to give credit to my colleague Jay Cross who inspired the thought), so here’s my obligatory place holder. When someone is thinking and learning ‘out loud’, e.g. putting their deeper reflections on line via, say, a blog (er, like this one, recursively), they’re allowing you to look at where and how their thinking is going. When they also are leaving a trail of what they think is interesting (e.g. by pointing to things on Twitter or leaving bookmarks at a social bookmarking site), you can put together what’s interesting to them and what their resulting thoughts are, and start seeing the trajectory of their thinking and learning. In formal learning, we can think of modeling behavior and cognitive annotation, the processes covered in Cognitive Apprenticeship as a development process.

How I use social media for my professional development This has been a common theme to many of the presentations, workshops, webinars and seminars that I have been asked to do over the last few years, but however many times I try to present on this subject I never really feel that I get the message across as clearly and persuasively as I would like. The issue of how we use social media for our own development as teachers and as digitally skilled individuals, is one that I believe is of vital importance though, not just because it can enable us to keep developing as teachers through the content, ideas, resources and above all people it gives us access to, but also because the way use digital media for our own development should guide and influence the way we use it with our students and build their digital literacies and communication skills. So here it is. This my own attempt to outline my digital media learning experience, or at least part of it. I’ll split this into 3 sections which I’ll call Information in My Netvibes Feeds Information out

Overcoming the Challenges of Social Learning in the Workplace by Shevy Levy & Jim Yupangco Social learning is a concept with significant roots in research and in theory, and it has been the basis of some educational designs for several decades. However, e-Learning design often draws more upon the notion of learning as an individual activity based on content and on delivery by an instructor or an expert. Times are changing, and with the advent of social media, e-Learning designers need to understand social learning and to adopt some best practices to support it. In the emerging view, learning is not just a transmission of “substance” from teachers to learners through a variety of pedagogical strategies. Traditionally, educators treated knowledge acquisition as an individual activity focused on content. Enter Web 2.0 technology — particularly trends in peer-to-peer sharing and collaborative development. The application of social learning in the workplace seems obvious, if not natural. Social learning is rooted in social constructivism (Hannafin, Land, and Oliver 1999, p. 119)

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