The Social Media Phenomenon in the Classroom

So what makes Skype so valuable to teachers that many of them have dedicated countless hours to collaborating with developers in order to create the new “Skype in the classroom” tool? There are several characteristics of this social media giant that make it incredibly useful to teachers and their students:

• It’s free: Without paying a dime, anyone can get free Skype-to-Skype calls, one-to-one video calls, instant messaging, and screen sharing. This means that it’s an affordable way to bring creative teaching and learning to life. Teachers can use the feature in the classroom or require students to use it on collaborative projects, but no matter what a teacher might want to accomplish, Skype is usually good for making it happen.

• It’s omnipresent: Access to Skype isn’t limited to the U.S. Anyone around the world with an Internet connection and a computer or smartphone can use Skype to broaden their horizons.

• It’s multifaceted: With both audio and video calls plus instant messaging and screen sharing, Skype has a lot to offer. Not only can teachers and their students listen to classrooms around the world, but they can also see them in action while interacting with text and images. This kind of variety is integral to inspiring students, capturing their attention, and helping them enjoy learning.

• It’s peer-to-peer: Rather than being based on a client-server system like most VoIP services, Skype is peer-to-peer. In other words, it takes advantage of background processing on computers that are running Skype software instead of charging clients to use servers. By enabling “peers” to share their computers’ resources, Skype decreases cost and increases the system’s total capacity.

• It’s full of potential: With hundreds of millions of users and a growing “Skype in the classroom” program, Skype has the potential to become a full-scope social network with the power to vie against the likes of Facebook and Twitter. With established clients and a peer-to-peer networking system, a few tweaks and additions could make it even more ubiquitous.

What “Skype in the classroom” Brings to the Table

The new tool for teachers and their classrooms has integrated everything teachers have always loved about Skype with some new perspectives on inter-classroom collaboration. Now, teachers can create projects that are either open to everyone or closed to include specific teachers. These projects help students get involved with other teachers and students from other schools, states, countries, and continents. The program also includes a directory that enables teachers to search for like-minded peers who would be willing to participate in valuable trade-offs of information and techniques. Finally, the resource section of the program is flush with links, tips and videos to help other teachers navigate unfamiliar territory.

If you’re thinking about giving the new program a try, you have nothing to lose – and you’ll be able to see yourself appear on the map of the 250 teachers from around the world who have most recently joined “Skype in the classroom”. It’s a powerful resource that’s just waiting to join your arsenal of favorite teaching tools.

Some ideas on how to use Skype In the Classroom:

• Using Skype For Teaching
• Learning Languages On Skype
• Homeschooling

Bio: Alexis Bonari is currently a resident blogger at College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching the Exxon mobile scholarship as well as fashion design scholarships. Whenever this work at home Mom gets some free time, she enjoys watching a funny movie or curling up with a good book.

Until recently, the timeline would only show that new posts have been added but the user had to click the link to see the updates. Not any longer!

Now, in real-time, message appear in the timeline as they are posted! This could be used to generated instant ideas or feedback from students. It can also be used as a real-time back-channel chat! Maybe you wish to create a quick poll on the fly! The possibilities are only limited by your creativity!

If you have an idea for this new auto-refresh feature, please share!

Now students can also message other students. Great for collaboration, sharing ideas, reminders etc!!

When logged in, click ‘inbox’. Under the ‘New Message’ section you should see all members of your class listed in the drop down menu (even yourself – I am always emailing myself reminders!).

One of the main benefits of twiducate is it allows teachers to create a virtual classroom, that is also private as only students and parents invited by the teacher can join and view classroom posts. Likewise, while other sites offer little content control for teachers, twiducate enables teachers to create the content themselves and tailor it to the needs of their students. It also circumvents the need for school administration and firewall prevention since the content is monitored by the teacher for the use of his or her students only.

Jeff Dunn, Executive Editor of edudemic.com further explains that this format is excellent for students and teachers alike, as they can share ideas across the platform. Teachers can post homework, test dates, and other assignments or reference materials, making it easy for students to keep track of their assignments. In addition, teachers can create questions for students to answer to test their knowledge of subject matter covered in class. Alternatively, they can post a discussion question, allowing students a safe place to discuss current events or other topics.

Twiducate also uses a Twitter-like format that is excellent for introducing new concepts, micro-blogging and writing assignments. In fact, the New York Times Learning blog suggests using it as a way to stimulate creative writing. For instance, teachers can have a class to write a novel collectively by providing an introductory sentence and then encouraging each student to add on a single line. However this isn’t the only way educators can utilize the site to teach students to write creatively. Teachers can also assign an essay on current events, but limit the assignment to the Twitter maximum of 140 characters to inspire concise writing. Teachers interested in incorporating these types of activities may also want to explore sites such as Online Teaching Degree as well as PBS.com, which provide a number of lesson plans as well as useful tips for teachers.

Dunn adds that the benefits of twiducate extend beyond providing educators with more tools for teaching. Since the website acts as an extension of the classroom, students can collaborate on projects and share ideas outside of school. By simply logging on the site, students have the ability to track class work or post questions about homework to the teacher or other students. However, by far the best benefit is the privacy twiducate affords to students. Unlike other social networking sites where posts can be viewed by nearly everyone, often creating an outlet for cyber-bulling or cyber-stalking, posts on twiducate are only accessible to a student’s teacher and classmates.

Clearly twiducate has great potential as a tool for teachers and a safe place for students to exchange ideas in an open forum. This format may be more conducive to learning than the traditional classroom model since the distractions and time constraints are removed. As more educators join the site and share their ideas, the potential ways of utilizing the technology are as varied as the site’s visitors.

Alicia Moore has always loved to learn and is working toward earning a teaching degree. She is particularly interested in how the advent of the Internet and technology are changing the educational landscape. When she is not exploring the future of education, Alicia enjoys writing about literature, languages and online resources for teachers.

Many IT departments were restricting the traffic flow when twiducate servers kept pinging for new posts.

Will have to explore new ways to auto-update the posts’ timeline.

Also exploring new methods of displaying the comments section.

-Brian

With this a teacher (or student) could create a thread, have students and teachers respond, save the timeline and start again. Easily save word docs’s containing the information from each topic thread, thus allowing for a ‘cleaner’ timeline.

Secondly, teachers and students can now private message each other. This is useful for teachers to leave feedback and for students to ask questions privately.

Lastly, a new button has been added to student posts. Here teachers can leave private feedback on specific posts. The ‘comment’ section still exists for everyone to see. This ‘feedback’ feature is private to the author of the post!

Thx to all who have suggested ideas! Keep those suggestions coming!!

-Brian

In the field of education, perhaps no other force is more powerful than eLearning and its associated technologies. Simply stated, the traditional definition of eLearning is the use of technology to support learning and teaching. This includes, but is not limited to, the use of interactive websites and blogs to support educational initiatives. It also includes in-classroom, and out-of-classroom technologies like tablet computers that students can use anywhere to complete assignments and read textbooks.

eLearning technologies have also been instrumental in creating a framework for distance learning that was unthinkable just a decade ago. If you are older than 30 and have ever taken what used to be called a “correspondence course” you may remember printed course materials that came via the postal service. Often there would be no interaction with any other students, and all assignments had to be completed in solitude, and then mailed back to the instructor who was usually hundreds of miles away. When the world wide web exploded in the late 1990’s this allowed people to communicate instantaneously via chat, email, and message boards. As web hosting technologies became more advanced and internet speeds increased this allowed additional functionality like live video chat and group conferencing to take place.

Although there is much promise in eLearning to improve the educational outcomes of students around the world, it is not a panacea for all problems associated with Education. In the early days of eLearning, some educational professionals thought the assistance of computers would help students acquire more knowledge. However, as most primary and secondary schools as well as institutions of higher education employ these technologies, they are finding that the main factor in whether students acquire knowledge is the effort they put into the learning process.

Today, eLearning is at the crossroads of widespread adaptation in the general public. In the prior decade these technologies were limited to elite schools due to their high cost of acquisition. In 2011 however many public schools and middle income families are able to purchase tablet computers, such as Apple’s iPad, as the cost decreases each and every year while the technological abilities of these devices only get better and better.

As eLearning progresses throughout the decades experts agree that one of the biggest remaining challenges is ubiquitous high-speed internet access. While many large metropolitan areas have excellent 3G coverage for high speed internet, rural and outlaying areas struggle with connectivity issues. Because most eLearning technologies rely on the internet and cloud based storage – connectivity is the defining issue for eLearning today.

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You can now toggle between ‘rich text’ and ‘plain text’ so the normal (as opposed to mobile) version of the site works flawlessly on your mobile devices (iPod, iPad etc).

This is a better solution to the mobile version I started a while back.

Not get out the iPad and give it a try!