It took me a little while to decide on the approach I wanted to take with this assignment. As a former fourth grade classroom and virtual teacher, I could have looked for experiences using social media in the fourth grade. As a former instructional coach, I could have widened the search to K-6 or looked at how social media has been used in professional development. However, I wanted to make this assignment relevant with what I’m doing now.
As an instructional designer, I work with faculty and adjuncts across a variety of content areas. Part of my work is working on new online courses and revisions, part is assisting faculty with educational technology in the classroom, and part is faculty development. Limiting my search to one content area didn’t seem practical for my position. So my search was for higher ed examples of having used social media in teaching either online or face-to-face or for professional development. I didn’t limit the content areas so that I could expand my toolbox of ideas to share with faculty regarding the use of social media across content areas. I was thinking that I would end up with a list of ideas really content specific and some that would transfer across areas.
At first it seemed like examples of where social media had been used were hard to find. There are lots of lists out there with suggestions, however the stories of where these ideas have been implemented are a little more difficult to find. I’m not sure if that’s because social media isn’t being implemented in higher ed, or if the stories aren’t being shared. Either way, that’s something thing consider.
Eventually, I started to find some resources showing it’s use. I found an article that shared research on using Twitter and blogs in two courses. Then I found another article that shared a couple ideas and linked to some blogs and bloggers that were really helpful and led to some other good finds. I’m adding those to my PLN!
For this curation, I tried out Pearltrees which I hadn’t used before. It was easy to use and offers many ways of adding resources. See my curation by clicking on the link at the top of the page. Included in the curation are ideas for using Twitter, blogs, Facebook Live, Snapchat, Slack, Pinboard, and RSS feeds. I added a note after each link to share a little about the resource.
As I consider the instructors included in my curation, most are risk-takers that are not afraid to try new things and who were on the hunt for better and more natural ways to communicate and engage students. They also were not afraid to share their ideas, successes, and failures for the rest of us to learn from.
Really what it all boils down to is that the gist of social media is communication, and we communicate in every course – so each of the ideas in the curation can be implemented in any content area in face-to-face courses and online. I’m pleased that rather than finding the listings of content specific ideas that I was expecting, these are ideas that I can share with anyone in any content area, and that I can use myself in the online course that I teach from time to time. Using these ideas is kind of like finding a good recipe that is more like a method (Rachel Ray) where you can change out a few ingredients and come up with lots of different great things to eat.
As with anything else, what is attractive to one person may not be attractive to another. So it is with learning activities. Keeping that in mind, as we design quests for our students, choice becomes important. When we provide choices for our students, they can select quests that are targeted for their learning level and personal interests. They will select what is attractive to them, which could be based on a number of factors.
We can step up engagement in our classes by incorporating game characteristics and traits of a game environment. Some simple ways to begin include offering choice, multiple attempts with prompt feedback, and breaking large projects into manageable chunks.
Catalyst 