The Socially Networked Classroom : Pt 1 - The Teacher

If you are reading this blog, chances are you already have made some social connections, possibly are in the process of developing a PLN and are already or are at least thinking about socially networking your students to each other and the outside world. Those of you who are at the beginning of this journey – hold on – it’s going to be an exhilarating ride. Get ready to be dazzled by the amount of opinion and content out there that’s being uploaded by educators on a daily basis. Your PLN (Professional Learning Network) is your best tool for finding out what’s new and innovative in classroom teaching and sharing your own knowledge and ideas with the world. There are educators online that are so generously sharing and its amazing the depth and breadth of the offerings, its staggering. Here are some ways to get into social networking as a teacher that I’ve tried and use regularly.
  Twitter: Make sure you sign up and start tweeting. Find some like-minded professionals and follow them. Look for people who tweet regularly, share links and stay more or less on the topics in which you are very interested in to start – you can be overwhelmed by tweeters so take it slowly to start! As you become less self conscious – you’ll really enjoy the interactions you can have online. Go to a Teachmeet: Although not strictly an ’online’ space, many educators that front up to these are also online – you will definitely find people with which to connect and these are the professionals that are really interested in what’s going on with technology, education and 21st century skills.
  Facebook: Use your Facebook as a learning space as well. Lots of education groups have a presence and if you are a regular Facebook user, it will be with very little effort you are connecting to your interest groups on a daily basis.
  Edmodo: Edmodo encourages groups of teachers (and students) to gather online in groups and discuss topics of interest. If you have something you are really keen to talk about online, think about starting your own discussion space and inviting others by email.
  Scoop.it: This is my new favourite. Create a Scoop.it account on a topic of interest – Scoop.it practically does the rest for you. It searches the Web, and as long as you have created a great set of tags, it will offer interesting posts, articles, Youtube clips – lots of different content direct to you and you can choose to ‘curate’ it onto your own site. You can add your own content too by using the bookmarklet. It works out a bit like an online newspaper, that you can update as often as the mood takes you. I highly recommend you give it a go. You could also try Tumblr.
 Blogs: There are lots of blogging platforms out there – Blogger and Edublogs are two popular sites to get started on. Weebly allows for a combined Website and Blog, which is very neat, particularly if you want to connect with other educators by offering content as well as opinion. Blogs are built for comment – don’t be shy add your two cents to someone else’s blog that you follow.
 Project 365: If you are feeling shy about writing a lot to begin with – maybe try a photo blogging site. These sites encourage you to upload a photo a day and talk about it briefly. Find some people to connect with and start conversations through the commenting facility. This is a great way to share what’s going on in your class with parents or other classes around the world.
Wikis (wikispaces): Wikis are great ways to connect with other educators on a particular topic of interest. You might like to join members of a PLN onto a wiki about something you are researching, collect web tools with others, and build a useful site cooperatively.
 Photo sharing sites like Flickr: Again educators are generously adding great content to their Flickr pages. You can share what’s going on in your classroom, create graphics and posters and add them to your Flickr stream. It’s a really good place to curate your images and they are accessible from any computer. Flickr has some great features which means you can work flexibly with your content – you can lock down a site to private, share with invited people or be public with your offerings.
Pinterest: This is pretty much the latest fad – think of a topic, scour the Internet for content. Pintrest is your personal online bulletin board to share.
Wallwisher: Post a topic, get contributors to add ideas, links, photos and videos. This is great for collaborative planning and thinking. Invite a few people to join you in a thinking session. These are great tools to use for professional development.
Many of these site (and others) have mobile Apps – so you can even connect with your PLN on the run - there's no excuse! And don’t forget to publicise your writing in a second forum. Your posts will be read if you tell your Twitter followers for example that you have just posted something for them to read.
Lots of these are not new, but are well used and worth mentioning and really work to establish you as a connected educator. The first step to a socially networked classroom is a socially networked teacher – give it a try!

365 Project

This year I have taken on the task of documenting our school year as a visual diary using 365 Project. As I'm just about half way through, its time to reflect on the process and its value.

The Process:
The 365 Project is a simple photo blog, take an image a day, add a caption and tag and upload to the site. For some students and teachers in the school it's been an easy entry into the world of blogging and interacting online in a safe environment.
The fun part has been taking the photos. Each week I look at the school's ever increasingly busy calendar and decide what should be covered. Often two or three days have special events going on - visitors to the school, a fund raising activity, excursions, sport etc - so they are easy days, but often not the most interesting. Its the random little snapshots of the school I find the most endearing. For example a Yr 3 boy has started a 'french knitting' craze in the grade. Its building, and each day more boys are getting into it. In fact I overhead the other day one student saying to another "I'm going to take this up a notch and get into sewing". These moments are priceless and in the big picture of a school year would normally get totally lost and forgotten. Now its there for posterity.
Taking photos around the school also allows some students to shine - they are not the sporting successes, the brilliant musicians, the popular boys that always seem to get in the money shots for the school - but instead I have been also highlighting the quiet achievers, the quirky characters. This is what makes a school rich.
I've been also asking for teachers to watch out and send me shots that they think might be worth including. Here's where the buy in from teachers and students begins. If they have contributed - their willingness to join the conversation about the images is heightened and we suddenly have a social network talking and looking at the pictures.
The photos literally take a couple of seconds to upload and write a caption - not a burden and at the end of the week I send out an email letting teachers know what's on for the week so they can share it with their class.
Each month I take a screen capture of the month calendar and print it - so an accumulated set of thumbnail images is growing on a notice board. This also serves as publicity for the project.
Next term I'm going to allocate responsibility to different classes each week to take "a week in the life of the class" - where their class is showcased. Similarly I think that can also work for specialist areas such as Art, Music and Sport.

10 ways to use the project with students:
The project can be used in many ways by many members of the school community. Here's some of what I've observed from the project so far:
1) Classes look at the weekly photos and vote on their favourites - discussion, argument and stating a case and finally voting for a favourite gives the boys a chance to think and reflect on the week.
2) Teachers and students select photos to include - again this is whole class decision making in action. Classes can agree on captions to accompany an image - or a student can be set the task.
3) Boys independently log on and comment on photos and therefore events around the school.
4) Parents can see what's been going on and also be part of the community and comment also.
5) The schools we connect with in other cities can see what we are up to and when we do things together, these images can be included and they can also comment - joining our community conversation.
6) Teachers can set a reflective comment as a homework task.
7) Once the Project comes along some of the way, there are mathematics opportunities for the class to tally number of times a class or subject is featured using the tags.
8) There are also opportunities for text type writing that can launch from the photos.
9) It presents an opportunity for the students to become engaged in a web 2.0 environment, interact with others and value the power of the image and reflective thought.
10) By the end, it becomes a really nice time capsule of the year.

I would recommend the project to anyone, a class, a student or teacher with a special interest or as a simple a reflection of the year. A family even can work together and collect their favourite snapshots and share them online, the site really has many possibilities to use it in a variety of forms. I'm hoping exposure to the project will give our students and teachers some inspiration to have a go.
Visit our site at http://365project.org/cjsphotos/365 and follow us, or join the project and leave us a comment.