Digital Blog Post #F

Chapter 8 consists of ideas on communicating and collaborating with social media.  In my opinion, social media has taken over a huge chunk of the technology world.  Children begin learning about the internet and social media as early as five years old, and as they grow eventually end up sharing ideas, pictures, videos, rumors, etc on the world wide web through these resources.  A successful teacher should learn to uses these programs as educational resources to help them teach his or her students.  Children can access social media at any given point throughout the day, why not use it to our advantage.  If I allow my future students to conduct research projects for a particular subject or topic on Facebook, for example, it will allow for during and beyond the school day learning.

Photo credit to Leonid Mamchenkov from Flickr

Today's lifestyles are completely different from what they were 15 years ago.  Students are learning with different methods to get their education as well as parents and guardians to get reports on their children's progress.  We all love being informed of things going on in the world, as well as knowing more than once a quarter during parent-teacher conferences how their children are doing in school.  It is confirmed that every 9 in 10 adults are engaged in some sort of internet communication service.  Using email and text messaging to often speak with parents about students' progress can be very helpful.  This allows the teacher to express her thoughts on the student and get assistance from the parents when needed.  Here is a link to a website that talks about using email-based text messaging to effectively communicate with parents and students.

There are other available methods to communicate with parents that can be seen more efficient than individually emailing or texting each parent, which is to create a website or blog to reach out to multiple people at once.  For the most part, most students are usually at the same level and learning as a group and creating a blog or website to primarily inform the parents of what is happening in the classroom can be sufficient.  A website can include due dates for exams, help for homework assignments, and a schedule of school events.  On the other hand, a blog can be created to be more personal about ideas or thoughts that can be or are being used to educate the students.  Websites and blogs are also a great idea to share among other teacher or professionals.  I plan to create my own website for my future students and parents to access.  This is an amazing technology tool to keep everyone on the same page and always informed.

Resources

Gomez, M. (2017, February 17). Communication. Created with ToonDoo. www.toondoo.com

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O'Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.