Anne Bubnic's List: Digital Citizenship/Social Learning Network

One of the challenges now facing educators is how to get today's technology-charged student reinvigorated in the learning process. Increasingly, teachers are introducing their students to the exciting possibilities of collaborating online. Increasingly, teachers are introducing their students to the exciting possibilities of collaborating online. Saywire is another commercial solution to the problem of providing a safe, protected environment in the schools.

A commericial solution to social networking in the classroom. ConnectYard enables schools to leverage popular social media for teaching students where they live and socialize, online. The platform offers K-12 schools their own private learning communities with controlled access that are integrated with popular social networks like Facebook, which serves to make course work more social and collaborative by keeping students involved and engaged both in and outside of the classroom. Only users approved by the school are permitted to join the community and interact with other users. This eliminates a primary concern of both parents and administrators.\n\nConnectYard also provides teachers with the ability to audit student groups, walls, etc. This serves to ensure that both the interactions and information being shared are appropriate, which helps to guard against cyber bullying or posting of copyrighted materials. Thus fostering safe and secure learning communities, or Yards, that improve the student educational experience and chances for success.

Privacy and security concerns are among the many barriers holding back the use of social networking tools in schools, new research suggests--but a number of child-friendly applications have emerged.

The California K-12 High Speed Network (K12HSN) is offering a comprehensive set of tools to support teaching and learning in California classrooms. This free suite of tools, known as edZone, was developed by the California Dept of Education and currently includes blogging, videoconference scheduling and a file sharing system where educators can upload videos, podcasts, images and documents. EdZone is an excellent tool to share lesson ideas, upload student learning objects, disseminate best practices, and more! EdZone will soon be expanded to include Instant Messaging, Moodle, Wikis, Social Networking, Moodle-an online course management system and other Web 2.0 tools to enhance today's classroom environment. Watch for these new tools in Summer 2008!

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has some suggestions for how schools can spend their windfall from the economic stimulus law, including summer school and extra pay for teachers to coach struggling colleagues. The nation's schools will get an unprecedented amount of money - about $100 billion, double the amount of education spending under President George W. Bush - over the two-year life of the new stimulus law.

Another fine presentation by Tom Barrett

Whether we like it or not, Google or Wikipedia are our student's first ports of call when it comes to researching or undertaking independent study, not the school library. Diigo offers a fantastic way to tap into the way our students operate by allowing the annotation of web pages which can then be shared with your students and, by doing so, you facilitate the process of research for your students and you set them on the right track for further independent study.

By now, you've heard the buzz about MySpace and Facebook, but you may still be wondering what all the fuss is about. Maybe you're a little mystified by the whole social networking craze, or you're a little wary about venturing into your students' territory. But what if we told you it can actually be good for your career?

An agency devoted to educating and inspiring urban youth to become successful students and global community leaders by engaging them in socially dynamic, content-rich learning experiences.

Writer, tech consultant, and educator Clay Shirky just gave a talk at the State Dept. explaining the media sea change we're experiencing globally. Keeping participatory media, the most fluent though not necessarily most literate users of which are youth, out of school only solidifies the firewall between formal and informal learning and holds school back from 21st-century relevance. Isn't the idea of adults unidirectionally disseminating to students info that the latter have actually never encountered before beginning to sound quaint?

Researchers asked two main questions to understand how to better support professional networking on Teachers' Domain:

1. How do teachers use social media tools in professional contexts, and for what purposes?
2. How are teachers likely to use social media tools in the near future?

Findings from the PEW RESEARCH REPORT: "Social Media and Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults."

Enter social video games as a solution — immersive environments that simulate real-world problems. Today, technologically eager schools are replacing textbook learning with social video games, and improving learning outcomes in the process. Here’s how they’re doing it.

Blocking access to these tools in classrooms discourages student-centered learning, leading education technology consultant says

Do you wonder how kids are being affected by growing up in a globally interconnected, multicultural, participatory world? Whether you're a parent or educator, it's important to understand the challenges and opportunities experiences like posting to Facebook, creating a blog, or IM'ing offer to kids, and what you can do to help your kids be successful today.

Teachable moment: In addition to the three important lessons, the teacher guided students through a process of creating and posting their own version of appropriate rules for cell phones in school. Over five dozen student comments are posted. Interesting stuff.

Brainpop's new unit on Digital Citizenship covers topics like computer viruses, cyberbullying, blogs, copyright, digital etiquette, privacy, online safety, plagiarism, and social networking in their familiar format. And best off, it's all free.

Schools should reflect the world we live in today. And we live in a social world. We need to teach students how to be effective collaborators in that world, how to interact with people around them, how to be engaged, informed twenty-first-century citizens.

Months before the newly hired teachers at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) started their jobs, they began the consuming work of creating the high school of their dreams -- without meeting face to face. They articulated a vision, planned curriculum, designed assessment rubrics, debated discipline policies, and even hammered out daily schedules using the sort of networking tools -- messaging, file swapping, idea sharing, and blogging

Author James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, explains how the decision-making ability of a diverse group of people is more effective than that of individuals.