Practical+Uses+of+Social+Media+in+the+Classroom

=What is social media?=

One of the most recently published print books about social media, [|Social Media for Educators: Strategies and Best Practices] (April 24, 2012), defines social media by using social media to define social media. Isn't that a fun sentence? Why curse when you can be recursive? The defining characteristic of social media is "crowdsourcing." This is "when an act, such as problem solving, is outsourced to a network of individuals who offer an array of solutions" (6). From my own experiences with educational social media, I would add that for instructional purposes, social media involves teacher/adviser feedback, the ability to link directly to source material, and the flexibility to allow "everybody and everybody [to] share anything anywhere anytime" (6).

=Are there examples of practical uses of social media in the classroom?=

The purpose of this WikiPage is to organize my research into definite categories and share what I'll be communicating with the class with my research group. Using this type of social media allows me to share and collaborate with my group members without having to meet physically, to make notes without having to change to an email or word processing program, and to access the group's work, updated second-by-second, from any internet-ready site.

WikiSpaces
WikiSpaces like this one are a great example of social media that can be used in the classroom. WikiSpaces offers teachers the ability to create and manage student group collaboration with [|WikiProjects], a comprehensive way of monitoring student effort, group progress, and individual productivity. Different options, like the ability to customize sites or make WikiSpaces ad-free, are available to educators both for free and by school subscription; [|pricing options] give the specific options available to individual teachers and administration.

Project Foundry
Teaching with social media is controversial for many reasons. Foremost among these reasons are questions of the usefulness of social media as opposed to more traditional pedagogical tools and concerns about the applicability of different academic subjects to social media formats. I encountered a practical application of a social media tool called [|Project Foundry] when I taught Spanish at a charter middle school in Henderson, NV, and the use of that tool combined with another social media tool called [|Senior Project] give students the resources they need to propose, plan, and execute project-based learning as students, as autodidacts, and as members of a greater community.

Five Reasons to Use Project Foundry (according to Project Foundry):

=Top 5 Reasons To Choose Project Foundry = == [|Students Learn When Interested]  ==

== [|Piles of Paperwork are Not Easy to Search]  ==

== [|Quickly Generate Standard-Based Transcripts]  ==

== [|Life Skills are Part of the Learning Process]  ==

== [|Digital Portfolios Should Be Digital]  ==

Explore Knowledge Academy
[|Explore Knowledge Academy] is a public charter school that was founded in 2001 by Dr. Joan Sando with the generous help of [|The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]. EKA uses the [|EdVisions]model to promote Project Based Education, through which students learn in non-traditional classrooms, called advisories, with the help of a social media program called [|Project Foundry]. Project Foundry allows students to take charge of their own learning by developing in-depth projects. The development of these projects is monitored by their adviser via Project Foundry, which keeps track of the students' planning process, research, project progress, goal orientation, and time management. It also incorporates intellectual space for reflection.

I designed this portion of our research project to reflect the priorities of project-based learning.

(from the EKA Website)

**Project Based Learning:**
 * Students complete projects in which they incorporate the curriculum standards for the courses in which they are enrolled.
 * They select areas of interest that are relevant to them and create an essential or guiding question to frame the investigative process.
 * A minimum of three resources are required to frame student research which include primary, secondary & Tertiary resources (i.e. Texts, websites, human experts and original factual documents & accounts).
 * Each project concludes with a presentation to an audience to illustrate what has been learned.
 * Students then enter evidence of the learning, which includes a reflection, pictures & images, or an essay in their portfolios.
 * Students must take responsibility for learning the curriculum standards for their courses, with the advisor acting as the learning coach to guide them to a higher level of work than they would produce on their own.

 Okay, so social media is fine for doing projects, but what about subjects that don't lend themselves to projects, like grammar? What student is really going to spend more than five minutes investigating, researching, and reflecting on the apostrophe?  That's a great question, and I'm glad you asked it. Traditional paper-based pedagogy would make a project like this daunting. What student wants to write a five-page essay on punctuation, and what teacher wants to read a stack of 120 essays on punctuation? We can't all be Grammar Girl. However, using social media can make learning about punctuation fun and interactive and can capitalize on each student's individual strengths. An example of an intensely researched grammar project might look something like this:  [|Apostrophe Assignment in Project Foundry]