Literature Circles

Most students are very familiar with Facebook or MySpace and understand about updating statuses. In reading class, we are currently working in literature circles while reading sports novels. One thing I think students would enjoy doing is creating a "Facebook status" for one of the characters out of their novel. Then the others students in the group could create comments that apply to the status. Students would need to make their status in regards to an event that happened in the book. Then the students would need to comment appropriately. This would be a quick example of whether students were actually reading and comprehending their novel.

Service Learning!

Every Wednesday, students attend an anti-bullying Olweus class. One of the requirements of Olweus is that every class complete a service learning project. I believe Facebook could assist students with completing their service projects. The service project that my class has completed every year is that we sell May Day baskets and with the money we buy food. The food that we purchase is distributed to families in need. We only purchase food that students can make on their own. This way students are hopefully able to make sure they have food that they can cook.

While the May baskets are for sell, we also hold a building wide competition to see which Olweus can bring in the most cans. We have a parent who donates ice cream and each grade level has one Olweus wins. The students could use Facebook to invite parents and other community members to participate in the food drive. I envision that we would have a huge response from people in the community and that would enable us to help so many more families. As a teacher, I believe that we would have to be in control and monitor any interaction on Facebook.

The school district that I work in is changing and the need for assistance is growing. After a meeting a school board member shared on Facebook what our building was doing to assist families during the holidays and how the needs had changed. We had people that had no connection to our building bring in donations to assist these families. It was amazing to see! So I believe that we could use social networking to assist in completing our service learning.

Social Networking in Education

Whenever I think about social networking in school, I think about the issues that it causes daily in our classrooms. I think about the girl who comes to me crying because another person wrote horrible things about her on Facebook. I think about the student who feels left out because he or she was not invited to a friend's house and everyone else was invited. These are my first thoughts when I think about social networking in education.

For this assignment, I had to take a step back and really think about social networking. How could this be used in the classroom?? One way is to have students create profiles about a character in a novel that they are reading. I read about a site that you can create fake profiles that resemble a Facebook profile. I believe this would be one way for students to demonstrate their understanding of the character and then they could share them with others. Another thing teachers could do would be to post journal questions and students would be able to answer the question on the teacher's Facebook wall. This would give the teacher and all students the opportunties to participate in the discussion. I know several teachers who post journal questions to their blog and then have students comment.

I believe that in order to use Facebook we would have many hurdles to jump in trying to justify its use. The first hurdle would be allowing Facebook to be accessed through the school firewalls. The other issue that we have is that not all students are allowed to have Facebooks. I am uncomfortable with allowing students to have access to my Facebook so if I was to use Facebook in my classroom I would create two separate accounts. I would also want to make sure that parents are aware of how and why we were using Facebook.

I always thought that I stayed pretty current with new technology. After reading the assignments for the week, I realized that there are lots of new technology that are unfamiliar. I was very excited to learn about http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit because the biggest daily struggle I have with these years students is writing. I believe this would motivate students because they would be working with authors or illustrators. The feedback that they receive would seem authentic and it would not be just from another teacher. I also believe that they will be very excited to publish their own writing. There is a step-by step directions on how to write a myth and this is an activity we already do in language arts. I believe this would be an excellent place to incorporate this site. I think this could create some difficulty for students who do not have access to a computer and and internet at home. These student would only be able to work on this at school and with limited access this could become frustrating for students.

I believe that sometimes schools have such a focus on standardized testing and the bubble population that we do not always remember to challenge our higher students. I love the idea of having them create their own web site or mini-games. Creating a site or mini-games could be an activity that all students could participate in during the school year. Although, I believe that you could create an extension assignment that would challenge the students who finish an assignment before everyone else.

There is so many ways to incorporate different types of multimedia technology into education. This class has allowed to find experience new things and then incorporate them into my classroom.