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Mission for this Week: 2/21-2/28

By Jason Bedell, on February 21st, 2010

This is going to be a busy week. Many things are coming to a head all at once. First, I am going to have to go on a marketing blitz for TeachMeet, which really means that I will be calling nearly every school within 3 hours of Nashville. Mostly, I have been calling librarians and asking them to distribute information to their staffs. I have been calling PD coordinators and instructional technology coordinators/coaches as well, but have been getting less enthusiastic responses from them.

Second, I need to finish the video tutorials to accompany Chapter 2, which should not take long. Third, I need to write the 3rd chapter in Techniques for Effective Technology Integration. The chapter focuses on harnessing the power of social networking and will discuss how to best use tools like Ning, Twitter, Edmodo, and Facebook with students.

I would really appreciate some advice and stories of teachers using these tools with students for my From the Teachers section. If you have any experience using social networking with students, I would greatly appreciate it if you left a story in the comments.

Thanks again,

Jason.

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  • http://rsu2teachertech.wordpress.com Lydia Leimbach

    Ning has been a lifesaver for me as a club advisor. Our high school schedule does not give us time during the day for meetings, and as we are a small school, most kids are involved in afterschool sports. Forget about getting kids to a meeting at 7:30 AM! Ning lets kids have ownership of the club. They know they can start a volunteer project by posting a discussion about it and asking for sign ups or help. They can send notices to the whole club or just one another about projects. I end up with a record of who has done what which is important as we hand out scholarships at the end of each year. I don’t know how I did it before Ning!

  • http://jasontbedell.com Jason Bedell

    Thanks for the comment Lydia. Ning really does allow us to make dynamic communities. Club use is a great example that I hadn’t thought of.

  • Tom Scheeler

    Edmodo is a 24/7 hub of activity for my classroom. I use Edmodo as my main communication source with my students, for short writing assignments, conducting classroom polls, sharing files and links, and embedding videos, wallwisher, glogs, Google Calendars, etc. The embed feature is one of my favorites. I use the RSS feature of Edmodo for word of the day vocabulary and I also feed my classroom Twitter account (@MrScheeler)as well as the school Twitter account(@MPS_JimHill) to my Edmodo groups. Students subscribe to notifications in the settings area to receive notifications via e-mail or SMS of new information posted in the group (optional). SMS is the preferred method for most of my students.

    Edmodo is extremely easy to use. It kind of looks like Facebook, which the kids love, so the interface is clean. Any teacher with basic tech skills can figure it out, but a wiki is provided on the home screen for directions if needed.

    All of my classes are signed up and each class period has their own group. No e-mail address is needed for students to register and students can belong to multiple groups if they have several teachers using Edmodo. If that is the case, the teacher just needs to provide them with access code for their group.

  • robyn

    Well Jason I have to say the one time I tried to use Twittter in class it was a major success. Where I’m from they aren’t blocked and we were using Twitter as a review game, and it was marvelous. If they got the answers wrong others would reply to them to let them know. Hope this helps, if not, let me know

  • http://jasontbedell.com Jason Bedell

    Thanks Robyn. It’s good to get varied ideas on how to best use it.

  • Liz Pope

    Hi Jason. Sounds like you have a busy week! I’m part of Edmodo’s media team and saw your query for advice and stories from teachers. If you you’re still looking for resources, I can set you up with an interview with one of the Edmodo co-founders, or I have several teachers on hand that could chat with you about Edmodo. Feel free to email me at liz @ sevansstrategy.com if I can help.

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