Social Media Matters

What is social media etiquette? Nothing is ever private. Even though you may think that your social media accounts like Instagram, Facebook, and twitter are private, they are not truly private. Anything you put on the internet is there forever, even if you think you took it down. So many people have ruined their careers because of social media. Whatever you would not want your job to know about do not post anything related to it on any social media account. Olivia Sprauer was a freshman English teacher who did bikini modeling on the side. One of her racy bikini photos got to the principal and she was asked to resign. She had to give up her career because she needed to make extra money and posted pictures of herself on Facebook that were not appropriate for the school setting and obviously the pictures were accessible by the wrong group of people.
Social Media can help you in your line of career. It can help you in the classroom as well. Just be careful what you share out in the social media world. Keep whats private, private.
 

Chapter 5 in The Connected Educator by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall is a great book with so many great tips for keeping things online. They tell us about tagging which is social bookmarking which is a way to organize content we access online and categorize items under labels such as Delicious. We also learned about tools for connecting and collaborating like blogs such as this website blogger or edublog. Blogs are websites that are continually updated with journal like entries that are usually organized in chronological order. Blogs are there for users to leave feedback and discussion. Edublog is similar but it is for educators to communicate with students and parents. Microblogs lets you share information quickly and efficiently with your PLN. PLN stands for personal learning network. Personal Learning Network is how you get connected with people in your line of career to learn new things or share your own experiences. For your PLN you can use twitter, wiki, or google documents. There are a bunch of tools for social networking such as Ning or classroom 2.0. There are also tools for extending learning in the classroom such as TeacherTube.

Techy Storytelling

Astronaut Abby gave me some great advice last week, that I would like to share! She shared that social media is there to benefit you. Its important to stay connected and have a presence in the world you would like to enter. Your private social media is not always as private as you believe. She also shared good ideas for what to add to your LinkedIn. Any writing you have done, and videos, any experiences you have had, any classes you have taken, and any volunteering you have done. You want to add anything to your profile that makes you unique! She also said how the 24 hour rule is a great thing you should do. The 24 hour rule is when you contact someone within the 24 hours after you have met them.

This week we talked about different websites that help with digital storytelling. Some websites we learned about are sway, emaze, haiku deck, and many more. On sway you can import tweets, videos and pictures to tell your story. Emaze is 3D, you can make a powerpoint and then import it into emaze or you can just create your story on emaze. Haiku deck is picture based and on each slide you can only put five bullet points.

Animoto is a popular video creating service. It has been in the making since 2005. The site is updated regularly and even has its own app. It is great for educators but if you are not a paying user there is a 30 second limit on your videos. As a student user you can make videos that are about two minutes long.  Animoto lets you add text, pictures, and videos into a pre-made template of your choice to tell your story. It is quick and easy and the videos come out in pretty great quality.
Heres an example of a commercial I made about my major here at Stockton University using animoto:
Commercial

Being a techy teacher is a good way to help your students. There is this web tool called Voki. Voki lets you create an avatar. If you are a paying subscriber there are many different avatars to choose from. You can edit the avatar to make it fit your liking. Then you can record your message that you would like the avatar to say. There are four ways you can record your message: phone, microphone, upload a voice file, or enter a text and use a computer animated voice.
 

Making it fun!

Adam Taylor is a Tennessee high school science teacher. His interests include science and technology. He wants to incorporate technology into classrooms all over. Adam has connected his students to 150 scientists around the world and brought the outside world into the classroom to make science more fun and interesting for his students.

Presentation tools- Life beyond Powerpoint
In Chapter 3 of "Untangling the Web" we talk about presentations and how they can simply and quickly become boring with each bullet point. Web-based presentation tools are cost effective, convenient, as well as flexible. Now there are need tools that are helpful when trying to make a presentation. Slideshare is an online social place where you can upload and share your presentations with educators all around the world. It has a library of shared presentations and PDFs, and word documents and much more. Slideshare has integrated with Facebook and LinkedIn. If you find a presentation that you like you can follow the person who created it and you will be notified when they upload something new. Poll Everywhere is a mobile-based student response system. You can ask multiple choice or open-ended questions. As an answer arrives the responses will show up immediately. Voicethread was created from an uploaded slideshow and people's face that surrounding the slide to represent audio, text, and video comments on the context. Prezi is a similar tool to powerpoint but it has more movement. It starts off far from the slide and then zooms in on each slide when it comes time to talk about it.
    

Ken Robinson talks about how children have a great capacity for innovation. Creativity is just as important in education as literacy. We should treat creativity just as equally as every other subject. If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with something original. In education we make students feel like mistakes are the worst thing you can do. All students are born artists and we should make the goal to keep them artists. Students should be free to express what they are learning in their own way.