Making the Classroom
Conceptualizing and Integrating Social Media into the Secondary School Humanities Classroom
Nate Kogan
Challenges of the Traditional Classroom
Teacher-centrism
 Students seek all validation from teacher;
lack confidence in own thought.
 Obsession with the “right” answer
 Teacher responsible for managing and
tracking all student work (paper-shuffling)
 Propensity for didactic lecturing
➡ reinforces “Sage on the Stage” notions.
Isolation of student work
 Students focus on summative product over
formative process
• Generally cram for tests; prioritize
knowledge of meaning-creation
• Focus on grade, not on comments
 Ineffective (and infrequent) peer-editing
• Prioritize social capital above
constructive criticism
Follow me on:
Fort Worth Country Day
Reorientation via Social Media
Student-centrism
 Insight and access into formative learning ➡
see students’ thinking process
• Students can see each other’s learning
process and constantly give feedback
• Teacher models constructive criticism
and act as lead-learner
• Discourages plagiarism through
transparency
 Reduce emphasis on summative product.
• Less focus on “right” answer and grades
• Shift focus to comments and students’
intellectual growth.
Twitter and Apps
Classroom
Interconnectedness
 Create accessibility and visibility for:
Collaborative Writing
• Students and teacher beyond the
classroom and the school day.
• Other classes and educators across the
country or the world
• Parents ➡ share student work digitally
:
@nkogan
http://nkogan.wordpress.com 11 September 2009
Social Media Tools Applications in Classroom
Blogs • Venue for Student Writing/Digital Portfolio
• Allows incorporation and embedding of multiple
media (video, audio, graphs)
• Allows hyperlinking and inter-textual connections
➡ Emphasizes citing sources.
• Ease of comments — from teacher and peers
RSS Reader • Central repository of student work
• Track student assignments & eliminate paper
• Create transparency for students to see:
• each other’s ideas
• each other’s and teacher’s comments
Diigo • Ease of tracking research and notes
• Annotate web pages
• Transparent research
• Students linked to each other’s sources
• Students linked to each other’s annotations
• Backchannel for class discussions
• Review tool for quizzes and tests
• Collaborative resource collection
• Utility to enhance class interconnectedness
• Student-to-Student feedback
• Student communication with teacher
Edmodo • Well-designed course management webpage
• Facebook-like interface
• Easy file-sharing and assignment posting
• Calendar and grading functionality
• Provides insight into formative process
• For both teachers and students
• Ability to track individual contributions
• Ability to track changes and previous versions
• Eliminates email attachment clutter