On the Libraries and Transliteracy blog a recent post called Take the Plunge, Integrating Social Media into the Classroom highlighted four steps that librarians and teachers can take to integrate social media into the classroom. They include, letting down the filters cautiously, adding digital citizenship to the curriculum, watch student conduct and 'the law', and finally, teach with social media.
Students already know about social media - facebook, myspace, etc. We should be using it and teaching them how to use it wisely and appropriately. It is a great tool to reach out to students and to encourage involvement in discussion and education. Many libraries already have Facebook pages and Facebook groups. This supports communicating with technology and integrating technology. It would appeal to kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, verbal-linguistic and logical learners. Teachers and librarians need to do more to get schools to allow social networking access and show administrators how social media can be effectively used in education.
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It's so funny that you just put this up here because I read the same article today an was planning to post to MY blog. =0P Ah well. I liked the article a lot. It was straightforward and simplified the process of stepping into using social media. There is almost an instantaneous gag response by many educators and administrators when it comes to using social media as an educational tool and I think we as a new class of young librarians have a responsibility to try to change that. Just because it's not how things have been done in the past does not mean it will not make things better in the future.
ReplyDeleteHello Christie,
ReplyDeleteI 've had that happen with a few of my posts, too. I agree that the gut reaction is to say "no", instead of investigating how useful social media can be.