Ch. 6 of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts

The Social Web

This topic is frightening to think of in a school setting. All these books about technology and our professor, Dr. Boyer, keep suggesting that we stay relevant with the youth and the technology they like to use, but day after day we see various cases of teachers getting into trouble for friending students on social networks and posting things about their jobs. Cellphones and texting have become a huge issue in classrooms across the country and although they want us to find ways to incorporate them, I have yet to see how that would work when they are banned from usage even in most college classrooms.

Richardson begins discussing his love for twitter. He teaches you how to set one up and the basic concept of the social site. He gives links to classes that use twitter with various ideas for using the social site, but I think it’s funny that one of his prime examples comes from Texas and apparently Texas has now placed a ban on teachers using social sites (see: http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/12/05/2681445/state-sets-social-media-ethics.html).

Social bookmarking seems more practical for use in the classroom, as we as a class have already practiced this. We all have Delicious accounts where we are required to add at least 5 resources a week. Richardson gets a little complex with it all. I know it’s not as difficult as it sounds, but it’s definitely overwhelming for me to think of setting up a social bookmarking site, bookmarking all of my pages, and then linking it to my RSS feed, as well as other tags to my RSS feed (oh great, more things to block up my feed) and then sharing it with my students. I feel like I need a personal assistant to do all this for me. However, I see the benefits of sharing resources and links through a bookmarking site such as Diigo or Delicious.

As a future educator, I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to use social websites such as twitter or facebook in my classroom. I’m pretty sure that the cell phone idea will be a definite no, but it’s always good to consider such options and the possibilities of using technology that so many are equipped with. I’m now an avid user of Delicious, and find it extremely beneficial for organizing the many sites and resources I have accumulated. I’m sure it will be a great asset for my students as well as me, to gain more and more resources.