The Social Web c.6

It’s crazy how the internet has connected so many people over the last decade. It has expanded with many useful tools that can possibly be integrated into the classroom in the near future.     

 I thought that the twitter section was really interesting. I have always heard about twitter and I have even recently made an account but have never really got all that into it and understood what benefits it can bring.  The book even calls twitter “a network at my fingertips.” There are many ways twitter can be beneficial, from keeping family updates to posting questions in a classroom.  I felt that using twitter in the classroom would be one of the best ways to keep students active during a lesson, weather this involves discussing or answering questions through tweets. There are many fantastic ways to involve twitter in the classroom; with this tool teachers can gain more resources through other teachers and community members can view what is going on in their local schools. When the community gets involved in what the students are learning, it always is a huge benefit.

 Another main section in the chapter was social bookmarking services. Before I enrolled in this class I had absolutely no idea that there were websites that helped you control and organize your favorite pages.  If you’re like me, then you have over 200 favorite tabs and it takes forever to search for the one you want, but with websites such as delicious it is an easy task to search and locate a specific location that you had previously bookmarked. This is such an excellent tool to use to not only save time and make your online experience more manageable but it also helps you share resources with other professionals in your field.  This helps minimize time that you have may spend researching different websites that could contain average information, and maximizes the excellent resources that other people have already found to be superb.

The best thing about integrating these different online tools in the classroom is that it helps get the students involved in the lesson and keeps them active in the learning. This benefits the students to be able to view different resources and ask questions without having to speak in class.