How to use Facebook in the classroom

I'm not going to explain how to use Facebook, because I'm sure most if not all of us in this class have one. I wanted to see if there were ways in which a teacher could use this popular networking site, and there is!

There was this one website, here, that I looked at, which had some really interesting and informative ways on how to use Facebook in a learning environment. Of course, if a teacher were to use Facebook you'd probably want to create a new profile separate of your personal one for the class. Facebook really is a great communication tool and a great way to get discussion going and collaboration.

The teacher could create a group for the class, upload photos from the class when doing a class event, have students use the "notes" part of Facebook, which in a way is like blogging, and have them all answer questions on there and have the other students comment on their peers' notes.

Teachers could also use the status update as a way to communicate with their students such as : "don't forget to study!" "do forget to do the homework!" "is thinking about a possible pop quiz tomorrow", etc.

I'd love to use Facebook in my classroom because it is in everyone's lives and is everywhere! Students will love it, it's fast, easy to use, and it is something the students are interested in.

-Danielle

100 Apps for Tech-Savvy Teachers

This is a great site to look at when wanting to include some sort of technology into any classroom. It has a ton of sites to use and apps. This is one site that every educator should bookmark or save because it has so many useful sites that could make an educator's life that much easier. A few of these we have covered, and a few we have heard of or glanced at, but I decided to look more into Flickr since we briefly discussed it in class.

As we have learned, Flickr has a creative commons area where people can share and take photos without having to use citation or accidently plagiarizing. Being able to use this site for a project for a history class for say a newspaper, a student could create a free account and be able to access pictures for their newspaper without having to cite anything. Flickr creative commons is teamed up the the Library of Congress, which is exactly what it sounds like -it's a website created by those who work the Library of Congress in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Their goals are to provide more information and knowledge to the American peoples via the internet. So, at the end of it all, Flickr's creative commons has a background in history. The creative commons do have a lot of historical pictures which would help a lot in a history classroom. Also, there are many different corporations and institutions that are involved that share their own images - with these photos I'm pretty sure one would need to use citations because they are owned by those institutions, but at least the student and teacher would know that these photos are legitimate because they came from an educational site.

Being able to use a website that has photos basically "plagiarism-free" for lack of a better term, is a great, useful place to do some research in any class for any project. The institutions that are sharing their informational and useful photos are a great help too for any kind of teacher and classroom.

Podcasting

I have never known how to utilize podcasts for educational purposes until I started looking more closely at it's resources for this class - the only time I ever used or listened to a podcast was for Harry Potter news from MuggleCast (geeky, I know). I then saw a few months ago that my parents were using podcasts to learn some basic Italian before they went on their 2 week trip to Tuscany. For the past few days I have looked into different ways this program could be used in the classroom and outside of the classroom for educational purposes and believe that it is fun and very useful - any type of teacher can use it!

There are podcasts for all different languages, math, science, history, English, you name it. The best thing about podcasts is that they are FREE! What's cool about these podcasts is that they are either someone talking to you or they can be videos. What I really think is cool is that if students want to say be able to speak a language better or learn more about a language, they can go home, and if they have access to a computer, they can listen to the podcast for free on that certain language and be able to practice - it's interactive and fun.

Also, the video podcasts could be helpful for a lesson plan if it relates to the material being taught for that day - the teacher could always pull it up quickly and have the students watch it and then discuss it.

Another usage is iTunesU, which I love and use even now for some of my classes in college, but I don't want to steal the thunder from the group who is evaluating this subject for class.

Podcasting in general just seems like a good way to get education from people to others via iTunes and the internet. It's free and it's an easy tool to access and use for the classroom to get that technological feel for the students and the teacher.

I'd most likely use this tool specifically for any video podcasts that could fit into a history classroom that would help my lesson plans. I'd also maybe have a day where the students would be on computers or laptops and listen to podcasts by themselves on the topic we are learning about or maybe a current events topic, being that CNN and many other news stations have free podcasts, and have the students write up a short essay on what their topic was and what podcast they used and how they found it.

I haven't seen many constraints - it seems as though it would be more beneficial in middle school to high school rather than early childhood education - it seems like there are more mature podcasts out there than for young children, but perhaps I just did not come across any at the time I was looking.

There's so much more that one can do with podcasting, but what I listed and discussed seems to be the most important to me and the most beneficial towards education. If I find anything more, perhaps I'll post some more on this topic.

-Danielle