Activity 7 - Social Media

Discuss your views on social media use in learning and teaching and in professional development.

* How do/would you use social media to enhance your PD?
*What are some key features of social media that you have identified as beneficial for teaching and learning?
* What are potential challenges that teachers need to be aware of when integrating social networking platforms into teaching activities?


I use social media in a variety of ways to enhance my professional development.

I have my twitter account which I only use for work - my contacts are all education related in some way.  I use tweetdeck to separate the different hashtags (currrently #ISTE2015 is #1).  I find twitter invaluable...so much information comes through - amazing links and thoughts and you can just skip the parts that are irrelevant at that moment.  It's not often that this tab isn't open on my computer.
We have a class twitter page that we use for edchatnz and linking our blog to the world.  This is at the moment a relatively underutilised method of professional development for my class, but the potential is there.

Facebook/the Primary teachers page/the Mindlab page - invaluable source of information.  The primary teachers page is awash with ideas and info and it's not often a day goes by when I haven't downloaded something or clicked on a link to take me in a new direction.  Obviously full of rubbish as well and sometimes i"d quite like to delete someone who asks what novel to read to their class for the umpteenth time, but in general it's quite informative.  You can ask a question or request a resource or idea, and within seconds someone from an entirely different part of the country or a different decile can answer your question and give you an entirely different perspective on the subject or confirm your thoughts.  The Mindlab page is just very helpful.  An easy to get to platform to ask questions and be surrounded by people who are doing the same thing I am.

Pinterest: I <3 pinterest!  Half of my boards are eudcation and the other half my other life.  I find it really inspiration to get ideas from such a variety of sources and be able to save them for later in such an organised way.

Blog: Our classroom blog is a great hub for us to show our amazing work to our friends and families (and the world) and parents can see what their child is working on and encourage them and give them feedback.  Children feel such pride seeing their work published and strive to make it the best and the authenticity of the audience doesn't hurt either!

The key features that I have find beneficial are:
* collaboration with other like minded people
* new ideas - I see / or the children see others ideas and can either run with them, or form our reasons why we don't want to
* tolerance - for others stupidity and inane opinions
* Children (and me I guess) regularly receive feedback and feedforward from authentic audiences
* Social media provides an audience that is completely authentic to our purpose
* THe connections you can make across social media are amazing.  For example - a online field trip with a school in Hawaii as they went to the volcano fields...amazing!

There are always going to be challenges when integrating social media into your teaching practice.  The world is an ever evolving place and as a the online world becomes more prevalent in ours and our children's lives.
The potential challenges we need to be aware of when integrating social media into teaching could include:
* cyber safety
* digital citizenship
* how parents feel about their children being online and how they monitor it (or don't!)
* how the individual school policy dictates our social media use in schools.