As my building begins to dive deeper into the "high touch" aspects of using Facebook to more effectively communicate with parents and community members, I can't help but think of how we would achieve better communication in our school without social media? It seems so long ago that we were facing these challenges without social media, only it was just a few years back when most of us were navigating the social realm and trying to engineer ways for both sharing and managing our lives for all to see.
Sitting in the parent meetings about what their take is on the use of Facebook makes me reminisce back to when I was trying to find a Facebook voice and wondering how this was going to fit into my life. Thankfully for our students, our teachers have been a part of this evolution and are now ready to impart knowledge of how to successfully manage such networks without both inflicting or receiving harm from our circles of followers out there in cyberspace.
But how do we teach these 21st century skills to our students? One way, is to leverage the technology being produced around us to inject classroom curriculum goals into technology projects and use modern influences to drive real learning and smash together media literacy with grade level standards.
Enter Fakebook...
Fakebook by Classtools has given teachers the ability to create fictitious Facebook pages that can be used to increase understanding of classroom concepts while teaching younger students about what is OK to place online for all to see. Imagine a teacher in class using Fakebook to create profiles for story characters or in my art/tech classroom creating profiles for artists or even for famous technology pioneers. All of this while also discussing with students proper e-etiquette when negotiating social networking sites. Fakebook requires no registration, but has limited features, but with an email address you can use My Fake Wall to add more content and even give fake wall updates.
No comments:
Post a Comment