Social Media for Teachers: Guides, Resources, and Ideas

Although students are evermore connected to the social web, many of these networks remain out-of-class digital playgrounds where students congregate. In a 2014 survey of 1,000 teachers, just one in five said they use social media regularly with students. Of course, it can be a challenge to incorporate social media into lessons. There are many gray areas for teachers to navigate, like setting guidelines, accessibility at school, and student safety. But to help teachers navigate this ever-changing landscape of social media tools, here are some of the best guides on the web for four popular networks, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. More Great Reads From Edutopia In addition to those great guides, there is a lot of useful information right here on Edutopia.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/social-media-resources-educators-matt-davis

Related: School Libraries make a difference • IL • Pedagogy

Online referencing generator Access to information has never been easier for students as traditional print resources are supplemented with information from a plethora of World Wide Web sources. However, the ease of information access has developed a 'cut-and-paste' mentality to research, resulting in a rise in plagiarism among the student population. In order to minimise this problem, students need to be aware of the importance of acknowledging sources and, in particular, the conventions of referencing. This in itself can be problematic as teachers and teacher librarians often struggle to offer advice on referencing the ever-growing range of information sources.

LIST OF PUBLISHERS Beall’s List: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. The criteria for determining predatory publishers are here. We hope that tenure and promotion committees can also decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards and/or geocultural locus.

35 Educational Resources to Encourage Inquiry & Inventive Thinking This is a sponsored post. I’ve scoured the internet, including all of my favourite social media sites, to bring you a fantastic collection of online inquiry and inventive thinking resources that I know will inspire and motivate both you and your students. The collection includes Lego, science, practical activity ideas, engineering, videos, animation, technology and a tonne of fun facts – so there is sure to be something for everyone! Sean Kenney Lego Certified Master Builder’s YouTube Channel: Best-selling author and artist, Sean Kenney, uses LEGO toys to build anything and everything you can imagine. CSIRO Crest: CREativity in Science and Technology (CREST) is an Australian non-competitive awards program supporting students to design and carry out their own open-ended science investigation or technology project.

Thing 31: Evidence Based Practice – Getting Started If school librarians can’t prove they make a difference, they may cease to exist.(Ross Todd – The Evidence-Based Manifesto for School Librarians SLJ, 2008) This first lesson in our latest Cool Tools track was inspired by conversations that started at a recent workshop by Jennifer LaGarde on annual reports and collecting data. Age of Distraction: Why It’s Crucial for Students to Learn to Focus Digital classroom tools like computers, tablets and smartphones offer exciting opportunities to deepen learning through creativity, collaboration and connection, but those very devices can also be distracting to students. Similarly, parents complain that when students are required to complete homework assignments online, it’s a challenge for students to remain on task. The ubiquity of digital technology in all realms of life isn’t going away, but if students don’t learn how to concentrate and shut out distractions, research shows they’ll have a much harder time succeeding in almost every area. “The real message is because attention is under siege more than it has ever been in human history, we have more distractions than ever before, we have to be more focused on cultivating the skills of attention,” said Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and author of Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence and other books about social and emotional learning on KQED’s Forum program. Katrina Schwartz

edutopia Videos can be an effective tool for teaching and learning English (or, for that matter, any academic subject) if used strategically and not as a "babysitting" device. My colleague Katie Hull Sypnieski and I wrote a previous post for Edutopia titled Eight Ways To Use Videos With English-Language Learners that shares instructional strategies for many kinds of clips. Here are a few of my favorite videos to use with those exercises. ACRL Report Shows Compelling Evidence of Library Contributions to Student Learning and Success A new report issued by ACRL, “Documented Library Contributions to Student Learning and Success: Building Evidence with Team-Based Assessment in Action Campus Projects,” shows compelling evidence for library contributions to student learning and success. The report focuses on dozens of projects conducted as part of the program Assessment in Action: Academic Libraries and Student Success (AiA) by teams that participated in the second year of the program, from April 2014 to June 2015. Synthesizing more than 60 individual project reports (fully searchable online) and using past findings from projects completed during the first year of the AiA program as context, the report identifies strong evidence of the positive contributions of academic libraries to student learning and success in four key areas: Students benefit from library instruction in their initial coursework. Join a free ACRL Presents live webcast to hear more from the report authors on Monday, May 9, from 1:00 — 2:00 p.m.

A Good Way to Create and Save Mind Maps to Google Drive October 25, 2014 MindMup is an excellent web tool that allows you to create beautiful mind maps. Mindmup does not require registration and is very simple to use. It is also integrated with Google Drive so you can save your mind maps straight to your Drive account. MindMup also provide a set of good extensions to enhance your mind mapping. Some examples include:

Eight Ways to Use Video With English-Language Learners This blog was co-authored by Katie Hull Sypnieski. This post is excerpted from their new book, The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools, and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners of All Levels. "I like the way you use videos with us -- you get us moving, talking, writing and speaking. The problem is you make us think too much." -- "John," one of our English-Language Learner students We can think of far worse things a student might say to us, and John's comment demonstrates our perspective on using video with English-Language Learners (and, for that matter, with all students) -- research and our experience show that it can be a very effective learning tool, but it has to be used as an active one. The word "active" comes from the Latin "actus," which means "a doing, a driving."

How libraries can guide people through the maze of information available in the digital age Erin Berman is innovations manager for the San Jose Public Library, a Prototype Fund winner in the first Knight News Challenge on Libraries. Below, she writes about opportunities worth exploring in the second Knight News Challenge on Libraries, which is now open for entries. The challenge asks, How might libraries serve 21st century information needs?

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