Microblogging for Educational Growth

Blogging is a great way to learn through the experiences and knowledge of others, however; microblogging can serve to be just as useful inside and outside of the classroom for both the educators and the students. Microblogging may have a smaller content base than a traditional blog does, but, it is still a great source of information that can be used to help all of us grow and develop as both educators and learners.

There are several different ways in which an educator can implement microblogging into the classroom. There are numerous ways in which a microblogging site, such as Twitter, can be used to fulfill the educational and technological needs of our students today. One article, entitled "28 Creative Ways Teachers Are Using Twitter" has discussed several different ways in which you could use Twitter in the classroom.

I know that I will be implementing microblogging into my own classroom in the future because it is a way of not only embracing the social media that envelopes our social world today, but, it is also a great way to go about educating our students and ourselves. I will use microblogging for my own personal development as an educator and as a learner, and I will also use it to implement ideas in the classroom so that my students might be able to have different and enriched learning experiences. In using these types of sites in the classroom it is important for the students to get a sense that the reading and responding that they will be doing is not simply a "lecture" but is a way of communicating; it is a "conversation." This idea is emphasized by Ernesto Priego in his article called "How Twitter will revolutionise academic research and teaching."

Social Networking Groups for Teachers?

I have discovered that there are social networking sites for teachers! Who knew?! I had always just considered social networking sites to be MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs. I had always wondered how you could keep your professional life and your social life separate and this would appear to be a great alternative (a blog would be a good alternative as well). There is one social networking site that I think will be extremely useful to me in the field of teaching English as a Second Language because it focuses on that! This site is called EFL Classroom 2.0. I like hearing ideas from teachers in every concentration because I can use some of those ideas, but, other times I need to focus on things that are directed only at English Language Learners.

TANGENT: There is a video on YouTube by Alan Levine, called Alan Levine - New Media Consortium. There is a quote in here by Alan Levine that I absolutely love that says, "I think we need to just sort of put aside this notion that we can keep up (reference to 'keeping up with the times')." He also states, "More or less, when I don't know something I have a network of colleagues and people that I can put out my ignorance to and they responded help me out." I like these ideas because it relates back to my previous blog about connectivism. It is so important to connect with other people so that you can expand on your own knowledge based on the knowledge and expertise of others. It is also important to understand that technology is changing so much that it is nearly impossible to keep up with everything. This is a comforting idea because for the longest time I felt like I wasn't "keeping up with the times", however, I am learning a lot!

A Teacher is Like a...

A teacher is like a piece of a puzzle.

You may be asking yourself how this is so. With the explanation that follows I hope this will become more clear to you. I have just read a seminal article on Connectivism called Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, by George Siemens. There are several quotes in this article that discuss the idea of making connections and how these connections relate to one's own learning. One of the quotes that I found to be substantial says, "The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual. This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed." Another quote in this article states, "When knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses." I have compared a teacher to a piece of a puzzle, because in the grand scheme of things, they are connecting to other pieces of the puzzle (other teachers, peers, students, etc...) and are learning based on these connections. There is only so much one individual (puzzle piece) can know or do, it is through this puzzle where we add all of the other pieces together that we can grow in our knowledge about the world around us.

There are also videos available on YouTube that George Siemens has posted about Connectivism. One such video is called The Impact of Social Software on Learning. A substantial quote from this video states, "The social software that we see in the form of blogs and wikis developed in order to enable these individuals in a quickly changing knowledge field to continue to stay current and to continue to learn from each other." This idea, again, relates to the idea of making connections among other individuals so that we may continue to learn from one another and expand our own knowledge.