Click through the link to read the rest of the guest post at Free Tech for Teachers.

Mr. Campbell saw that we were studying Greece and asked our class to help his class. His senior Western Civilization class had prepared Greek god reports and we were going to be judges. Through the use of Skype we sat in on some of their presentations. During the presentations, our students used the backchannel Todaysmeet.com. My 6th graders were excited to see other students’ work, talk with students in another state and oh by the way, learned a little more about Greek gods in the process. One of my students actually got to perform the song she wrote about Athena for her presentation to the class in Pennsylvania.

10 May 13 Permalink

kenyatta:

How did he become so influential so quickly? How does anyone? It takes the right piece of information at the right time, passed across small overlapping social circles, starting with a few hundred people at a time, then increasing.

In this case, there are four key players. Two of them are a couple: a journalist who lives in New York and a social media specialist who lives in London. The other two have roots in Pakistan: a journalist and documentary filmmaker who recently moved to the U.S. and a political commentator in Islamabad.

Each of them contributed to a chain of information that turned one man’s offhand comments about a helicopter in the middle of the night into an internationally known work of citizen journalism.

via soupsoup

This is not something I would normally post, but it’s a very, very interesting read. I think you can make some connections here, as well, about the power of establishing a PLN (c’mon… you knew I had to link it to education somehow…)

Source: soupsoup

7 May 51 teachingliteracy Permalink

Richard Byrne posts about how he uses Twitter and social bookmarking. If you’re looking to make your life easier with social media, this post is a great place to start.

22 April 34 Permalink

Kimiya Haghighi, 17, had a prose problem. As much as her teachers preached concise writing, her sentences remained long and overwrought — the words poured out, unpunctuated, one after another.

Then Aubrey Ludwig, her 11th-grade English teacher at Langley High School, introduced her class to Twitter, requiring that students tweet their responses to a Hemingway assignment in 140 characters or less. Suddenly, Haghighi’s writing was efficient, declarative, even staccato. “It was a total breakthrough,” she said.

Such assignments are coming under new scrutiny as Virginia and other states consider restricting how teachers and students interact on social-networking platforms such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Officials want to preserve the educational opportunity offered by Ludwig and other teachers but also want to prevent sexual predators from exploiting the casual tone of such sites to build rapport with potential victims.

31 March 11 ladyinspain Permalink