"Tweet at me!"

While reading up on the idea of using microblogging as an educational tool, I was struck by the simplicity of the following statement made by David Parry regarding how learning has changed: “The citizens of the future are going to have to learn how to participate in these writing mechanisms... Learning used to center around memorizing facts but now it’s a matter of learning how to navigate information”. In the article titled Educators Test the Limits of Twitter Microblogging Tool by Kate Ash, there are many examples of how educators have used microblogging, Twitter in particular, to foster a classroom community and make learning motivational and interesting.  One middle school English teacher, George Mayo, created an account titled "Many Voices" with which students from his classes and students from around the world were able to collaboratively write a fiction story by tweeting one line of the story at a time.  The teacher even got as far as publishing the story! “It was incredibly simple and really amazing,” says Mayo. “My students and I would come in, and suddenly kids in China had written a chapter for the book.”  I think this would be a really fun activity to do with a class or even a whole grade or school.

 In terms of professional development, I think microblogging can be very beneficial for educators looking for ideas or thoughts on classroom situations or issues with students.  Building a network of professionals whose "insights you value", according to the article 9 Reasons to Twitter in Schools by Laura Walker, helps to sift through the masses of accounts and find higher-quality information and resources than Google would offer.  I definitely plan to keep this in mind as I search for people to follow on my professional Twitter account.

Discovering Ning

I love the idea of a social network similar to Facebook being used to foster a community of learners, as was described in 7 things you should know about Ning.  I chose to examine the networking group called English Central.  This social networking group has so many useful resources that interest me as a future ESL teacher.  I particularly enjoyed the "Top 10" sites it features ideas like "50 tasks for teaching with only a blank piece of paper" and "8 ways to reach students".  There is so much this group has for me to peruse in this one group, it's amazing!

A Learner is Like...

Upon reading about George Seimen's new perspective on learning in today's world, labeled as his theory of Connectivism in the article Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age, I came to think of the learners we are educating in today's classrooms as a high-speed version of our now wireless internet.  With WiFi being offered in almost in every corner cafe and gym, we can be connected with information and people in an instant.  Today's learners are taking learning to a whole new level with their ability to learn the academic content or language others have learned in the past, but at a whole new pace.

According to Gonzalez as quoted by Seimen, "Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months..." (2004).  This fact brings the image of a learner from the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties as learning at the speed of what we first experienced as "dial-up" internet; a connection to the internet that took more than a few minutes and beat our eardrums up at the same time.  It seems as though learners in the past did not have accessibility to the knowledge of others as we do now.  This source of information is important, according to Karen Stephensen, as she state "Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge".  Another similar point is made by George Seimen in the video The Network is the Learning as he states "technology allows people to stay current with individuals around the world.  It is more effective than in the past...", supporting my idea of today's learners as the high speed version of yesterday's learners.

Oh, there's an app for that...

I stumbled across a gem of a blog post by blogger Edudemic that featured this week's "top ten" from Learnist titled Ten Resources for Getting Elementary Students Interested in Reading.  This post listed ten excellent sites to visit that offer even more lists of sites educators of young students could visit if they are looking for web tools that can be used by students who are doing anything from researching animals, learning about the foods of different cultures, or even working on improving their reading fluency. 

Out of the top ten sites that were featured on this post, I absolutely loved the site labeled Elementary Story Apps. As the title implies, this site offers a review of five Elementary Story Apps, each written by educational tools expert Carrie Sorensen.  The reviews are brief and concise, listing the positives and negatives of each Story "App".  The app titled Collins Big Cat Apps in particular caught my eye.  With this app, students can choose a digital copy of a picture book and click the "Read to me" button for beginner readers to read along or listen to, the "Read by myself" button for emerging readers, or has an option for new readers to create their own story and dialogue!  I will definitely be bookmarking Edudemic's top ten list post as well as the Elementary Story Apps site for future use.

Collins Big Cat Apps