Comment on Integrating Social Media into the Classroom

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.

Technologies that support verbal and linguistic learners

In our 2/23/ class, I found some of the technologies to support verbal-linguistic learners really interesting. Part of this is because I am, on some level, a verbal-linguistic learner, and use a lot of these technologies myself.

I am particularly fond on message boards and asynchronous discussions. They help me (and would be useful for students) to really think about what they are going to say and how they react to a given issue. It gives students time to reflect on the materials presented in class.

Although we used Second Life as a vehicle to discuss digital libraries, I think that virtual worlds would be an interesting way for students to learn and it applies to different learning styles. Students get to experience the information hands-on, they read and hear the information and they see the information.