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Social Media for Educators
Lesson One: Tools and Trends
http://lone-eagles.com/social-lesson1.html
Return to Social Media Educators Home Page
http://lone-eagles.com/social.html
Required Submissions for Lesson One: To post, send an email
to social-L@netpals.lsoft.com Confirm
with your instructor that you are able to both send, and receive 5. ____ Scheduled a Skype session with the instructor. Skype ID: frankodasz
a copy of your messages, to
and from the class listserv (without spam or junk folder complications.)
2. Read
the following lesson and be sure youÕve carefully read the Class Welcome
at http://lone-eagles.com/socialwelcome.html
and viewed the TED talk videos listed and reviewed the
How to Begin page http://lone-eagles.com/socialbegin.html
on the class
homepage
Share with your instructor your thoughts
on one or more of the TED talk videos you viewed on the Class Welcome
page.
(one hour)
(one
hour)
and leave a message, and upload a profile photo and/or video, on our class social media
site.
http://Loneeagleacademy.ning.com
This is simply one of many customizable social media tools where we can all create separate
discussion
forums to share ideas, resources, and talk about topics of
interest.
Explore http://classroom20.com to see an advanced global use of ning.
(one hour)
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In our age of accelerating change we hear a lot about the need for faster Internet to get us more information faster. Yet what most of us really want is less information, but of higher value and relevance to our often immediate needs. Social media is rapidly evolving. The use of web pages is on the decline, the uses of videos and apps are on the rise. See the top graphic but donÕt feel obligated to read the article;
www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1
Information
condenses to knowledge which condenses to wisdom and
VALUE is created in an age of information overload.
Today,
we read 3-5 line emails on our smartphones, even
shorter tweets and yet shorter text messages. Generational differences are
broad with teens averaging 100 txts a day?! My father
doesnÕt want to learn to use a Digital Video Recorder, and watches commercials,
losing 10 minutes of every half hour.
I no longer go the NBC nightly news web site to pick what I want to
watch, my Ipad has their new apps, and I swipe a
moving string of video thumbnails to see what I want to watch. Some just follow NBCÕs tweets, but IÕm
not one of them, yet.
Half
of the 2 billion Facebook users spend an average of
an hour and a half a day on Facebook.
Smartphones and digital tablets are far more personal than
laptops, and at what point the term addiction
comes up depends on who you are.
At
issue is our personal choices for achieving our
preferred level of balance.
What Matters Most - to each of us, is indeed a very
individual choice. We FIND and MAKE time for our priorities, and for anything
less, gee, we donÕt seem to HAVE the time. What tends to happen is that as we experiment with using new
tools, we often find they are really easy to use Òonce we know how.Ó If we find
weÕre saving time, we might continue to use them. If not, we wonÕt. What we
need to pay attention to is which tools millions of others have already found
useful, and why.
Briefly
consider these four levels of social media Òarenas of activity,Ó before we
begin to look at tools and methods.
1. ÒSocialÓ
media Ð keeping in touch with our real friends and family members,
entertaining ourselves, playing games; basically simply having fun.
2. Reputation marketing; working the social
media systems to shamelessly self-promote yourself, or business, or cause,
leveraging your new access to your friends lists of friends for ÒfriendlyÓ
exploitation. Utimately, this is all about making
money, building a following, etc. Seth Godin wrote a
book ÒTribesÓ and maintains a blog on this topic.
3. Making
a Difference, social media is the next big thing for promoting state and
federal agencies, and non-profit causes of all types, such as engaging college
students in service learning projects like VISTA and Americorps.
The CEO of Facebook talks about ÒmeaningfulÓ activity
as core to the Future of Facebook:
4. Social
media for Education Ð too new to really see yet, but peers are where we
already learn about the newest cool apps and stuff, right?
5. Coming
to a school near you may be School Enewletters, Facebook pages, local sports
tweets, and more.
Likely with business partnerships as an innovative way to
overcome budget cutbacks.
All
the tools weÕll play with in this class can overwhelm us with too much, and new
tools have continually evolved to condense the volume and provide more targeted
value geared toward our special interests. This is true with listservs, which have weekly digests listing in one message
a weekÕs worth of message, or blogs, which are condensed by topic at technorati.com,
or alltop.com, and twitter, or microblogging, limits
each ÒtweetÓ to 128 characters, though you can give a short link to media of
any length, too.
In
Lesson Three weÕll look at our Info-diets, info-literacy, and how to understand
our smarter options for getting control on info-overload.
Keeping
smart friends, and learning to benefit from the time already spent by others
hunting and gathering information, a two good reasons to take a hard look at
social media.
Is
Facebook a scam, one might argue it is indeed one of
the most successful scams in history. When you start a Facebook
account you might think youÕre just connecting with trusted friends and family,
but facebook pushes your friends to link with your
other friends friends, and
sells all collected data to companies eager for consumer demographics. Apple Iphones
and Google Androids keep track of where you go, all the time, including all the
searches you do on google, all as their marketable
consumer demographics. WeÕll look
more at this later, but if you think your privacy may be violated, you might
well be startled once you get the facts. Then again, there are very positive
aspects to all this, too.
NING.com was created by the guy who invented the
browser. It costs
$2.99 a month for a complete social media website, as youÕll see. Additional
costs for more features are typical.
GoogleÕs groups, docs, pages, and other cool tools are free, and
integrated, and growing, fueled by the worldÕs largest technology company.
In
the coming lessons youÕll be asked to create free accounts and learn by doing
Ð playing and noodling actually, to increase
your geekatude Ð your ability to self-direct
your own learning through experimentation. If a pang of fear just grabbed you,
then this is particularly targeted to you, and is likely a generational issue.
What's a Wiki?
A one-hour hands-on activity.
The goal of
this activity is to assure you know what a wiki is, and how to create and use a
wiki in education. If you already know how to create and use a free wiki you
donÕt have to do this beginnerÕs activity, but can invest your time in
exploring the advanced wikis and applications and in sharing your wiki
expertise, and favorite wiki links, with others in the class via our class
listserv. OR. Learn Jing and create a
video capture showing cool tools you think others in the class would find of
interest.
Email your instructor with an update on your
wiki awareness, established expertise, and time spend on this lesson adding to
your wiki knowledge.
Learn about
wikis by viewing the short video at
https://www.commoncraft.com/video/wikis
To see more social media tutorials from http://commoncraft.com
Click on the Social Media TAB at the top of https://www.commoncraft.com/videolist
To find
existing wikis by topic created by your peers try
googling pbworks K12
science
or any other
topic. FYI, pbworks is only one source for free wikis. See also www.wikispaces.com
WIKIs - Wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian and quick web pages with
collaborative capabilities is what wikis are all about. Wikipedia has over a
million entries, and is larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica - as one
outstanding example of wiki collaborative effectiveness.
Wikipediavision
http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html Shows a world map of Wikipedia contributions AS they happen.
Get into the habit of saving great urls
(web site addresses) throughout this course.
A suggestion is to create a private wiki to share them with your
students.
Be sure to write down
your login ID and password, and send the URL of your wiki to your instructor.
This can take as little as 10-15 minutes, more as your interests dictate.
If you already have created or used
wikis, you donÕt have to do this, but please share the links and your
experiences with wikis with your eager classmates via the class listserv .
To
create a free educational wiki:
1. go to http://pbworks.com/education
2. Click on Get Started in the upper
right
3. Select the FREE option
4. Give your free wiki a name - I choose socialwikialaska - and my web address became
socialwikialaska.pbworks.com
5. Select public or private, and explore
the tutorials and features such as Create a Page, (remember to save it,) etc..
Try it and report back to your instructor.
You will receive an email inviting you to
the blank class test wiki below, created with the above instructions:
Greetings to
those in the Social Media for Educators class. I clicked on
the link "Invite More People" on the upper right of the http://socialwikialaska.pbworks.com page on the
free wiki that I just created to invite you to this social media resources wiki. You have
been given Writer permissions. Please Click on CREATE A PAGE at the upper
right, and enter your name and add at least one resource to share. Explore the
features for at least a half hour. If you already have a wiki or use one,
please share the links with the rest of the class via our listserv.
In the coming lessons weÕll explore the following, please
send your instructor your recommendations
for additional social media sites
that you might have experience with to share.
Listservs
Wikis (have own, used, contributed to)
Blogs
RSS Ð Blog readers
Jing video captures
How to use Skype
How to use Google Classroom, etc
Google groups or other web forums like Ning.com
Create your own Youtube channel
Tweetdeck
Linked-in
Google+
Other: (please list all you use)
Required Submissions Checklist:
____ Posted your introduction to the class listserv
____ Send instructor a private email with preferred timeline
____ Scheduled a Skype session.
____ Viewed the TED Talk videos on the Class Welcome
page and reported favorites to the instructor.
____ Conduct the Wiki hands-on activity
Email your instructor with an update on your wiki awareness, established expertise, and time spend on this lesson adding to your wiki knowledge.
If you already have created or used
wikis, please share the links and your
experiences with wikis with your eager classmates via the class listserv .
Lesson Feedback:
You're invited to privately email your instructor:
1. What areas, if any, did you have trouble with during this
lesson?
2. What questions remain now that you've finished this lesson?
3. Approximately how much time did you devote to this lesson?
4. What improvements would you like to suggest?
5. What did you like best about this lesson?
Optional
Advanced Concepts:
Note: This first lesson is a bit longer than the remaining lessons so you can skip the optional reading below.
What
Matters Most Ð is highly individual.
A Luddites Confession:
From Frank Odasz
I was born in Cody, WY, but grew up in Mountain View, Calif. during the 1960s, now the home of Google. Upon graduating from UC Davis in 1974 with a BA in Psychology I had the choice to either work as a trainee programmer or as an oil field roughneck in the wilds of Wyoming, for the same big money; $5.80/hour. Well, that was a no-brainer. What could be more lifeless than sitting in front of a computer? Remember, Microcomputers didn't appear until about 5 years later. I was soon working nights outdoors during winter in the wind at 40 below zero.
Eventually, in 1982, after 3 years of being a Dude Ranch Manager I went back to school at the Univ. of Wyoming and received a Masters in Instructional Technology Ð determined to eventually learn how I could live and work anywhere using microcomputers and telecommunications to teach online and make a difference in the lives of as many people as possible.
For the past 12 years, since 1998, I've lived in a remote ranch house, no bosses, no employees, and have loved it. I consider myself an instructional entrepreneur, and a lifestyle entrepreneur. I donÕt spend all my time at the computer, instead, the computer buys me the time and freedom to enjoy outdoor activities.
I don't spend 16 hours a day on the computer, or pull all-nighters writing code.
What I choose to spend my time learning is only that which I can use.
Everything keeps changing so I need to keep learning to stay current.
Historically, my first reaction to new web tools is that they appear to
me to be a total waste of precious time.
In 1983, I read a lot about electronic data interchange technologies and my gut feeling was the world was getting too complicated.
As I look back on EDI technologies, now known as fax machines, I feel pretty silly. Type in a phone number and the document gets sent.
In 1994, as asst. professor at the
University of Montana, I had created an online network of one-room schools on
grant funding from US West, called the Big Sky Telegraph. We used text-based
dial-up bulletin board systems leveraging the efficiency of slow phone lines to
exchange two-page lesson plans. Then the WWW happened and everything had to be
transferred to web page format. I was frustrated by graphics that slowed down the transfer of
lesson plans and then needed to learn about web browsers. Looking back, I again
felt silly.
Soon, web logs, called blogs appeared. ÒNever have so many written so much to be read by so few.Ó Again, I thought blogs were silly, even after 60 million people created blogs. Today, I believe 2 % of Internet users actually follow blogs. WeÕll exploring blogging in one of the lessons.
Then came Myspace, 100 million teenagers made this the first global social media sensation. I didnÕt jump on board, and once a 10 year old Native American youth showed me his very cool site, with older young ladies photos who had befriended him, I understood why the main use of the Coeur dÕAlene TribeÕs new community technology center was filled with youth primarily enjoying myspace.
Then came Facebook, which I viewed as contrived shameless self-promotion and a waste of time. I created an account and received useless updates for eager users on what they had for breakfast, a mattress for sale in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I just couldnÕt see myself wasting time. OK, Facebook will launch an IPO valued at $100 Billion dollars with 750 million eager users. I still think Facebook is a contrived misleading system, but feel silly again, but maybe not quite so much. It is the lead on global social media marketing in a reputation economy, and is likely to prove relevant to how we all will learn to keep current on what we didnÕt know we needed to knowÉto survive in our era of accelerating change.
Lastly, Twitter, as a micro-blogging system, which IÕm told I should plan to use create a following, a tribe, to entice subscriber to my most exciting 128 character tweets. What a dumb idea for a network! And today 100 million tweets a day are consumed by at least that many eager followers on Twitter. I really donÕt want to be following multiple tweets a day from anybody, on my smartphone, Ipad, laptop, or Facebook page.
But, if I want to grow a successful business of any kind, I think IÕd
better start to pay better attention to whatÕs proving to be popular, and why.
In Conclusion; But, as a teacher of teachers, and as an instructional entrepreneur, to maintain my cherished rural lifestyle, and in order for me to help others in world of need, knowing I have the ability at my fingertips to make a real difference in the lives of potentially many millions; I feel obligated to keep learning.
Optional Advanced Links: Safe social media sites
is something we can explore.
Scott Wade, a local friend,
works with a team who created www.inclusionville.org
- a safe social media site funded by John TravolaÕs
brother, Joe.
Another friend, Scott
Cooper, has created www.itsourstory.org
- with 1000 inspiring video biographies of individuals with disabilities. HeÕs
looking for funding to use GoogleÕs free transcription tools to add text
captions for the deaf.
Below are links my online teachers have shared.
A book on ÒPreventing cyberbullying and sexting, one classroom at a timeÓ might be of interest at
http://www.schoolclimate20.com/
What you Can Learn from Eight Kids Already Making a Million Dollars
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241189
1. Social Media for Educators: Guides Resources and Ideas :
http://gettingsmart.com/2013/03/infographic-the-role-of-pinterest-inside-outside-the-classroom/
This website has up to date ideas and resources for popular social
media sites like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
2. Here is a fun infographic on Pinterest in education;
http://gettingsmart.com/2013/03/infographic-the-role-of-pinterest-inside-outside-the-classroom/
3. How Social Media is Reshaping Today's Education System: An enlightening read for inspiration.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/273044
4. 10 Great Ways to Use Social Media in the Classroom: informative article for getting started with social media.
http://www.teacherswithapps.com/10-great-ways-to-use-social-media-in-classroom/
5. http://fosteredu.pennfoster.edu/student-motivation-techniques-that-work-for-troubled-teens
6. http://www.motivation-tools.com/youth/3_at_risk_youth.htm
7. https://www.unigo.com/pay-for-college/scholarships/10-scholarships-for-non-traditional-students
Do you know of Howard Rheingold's work? http://socialmediaclassroom.com
Howard wrote one of the
first books on Virtual Community; Homesteading the
Electronic Frontier.
My favorite chapters are on
the Big Sky Telegraph, my rural schools online project from 1988-1998.
Howard lectures on 21st
Century Digital Literacies at Stanford and UC
Berkley.
You can download for free his 280 book "Peeragogy Handbook" at
His Learn 2.0 link is
http://dmlcentral.net/blog/howard-rheingold/diyu-experiment with others
below.
An Email From Howard:
You might be interested in
using this for your teaching: http://socialmediaclassroom.com
This is a course I taught
this Fall: http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/vircom
This is Howard's latest passion, digital literacies:
Videos & Blogs
Video 21st century literacies 40 min video http://blip.tv/file/2373937
JD Lasica's
6 min video interview with me, same subj: http://bit.ly/eFqeI
Video 24 minute on Crap
Detection 101: http://blip.tv/file/3333374>http://blip.tv/file/3333374
Blog 21st Century Literacies: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?blogid=108&entry_id=38313
Blog Crap Detection 101: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=42805
Blog Twitter Literacy: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?blogid=108&entry_id=39948
Blog Attention Literacy: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?blogid=108&entry_id=38828
BlogMindful Infotention: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?blogid=108&entry_id=46677
Howard Rheingold Email: howard@rheingold.com http://twitter.com/hrheingold