Microblogging

Using Twitter as a tool for education? It sounds like it has a great deal of potential within the classroom and it could increase the students interest in almost any topic. I read the articles Can we use Twitter for Educational Activities and Forget E-Mail:New Messaging Service Has Students and Professors Atwitter . From the field of Social Studies, I would love to use twitter within the classroom to keep the students up to date on current events, it has great potential to keep students together on group projects because they will be able to collaborate outside of the classroom, as a teacher I would be able to follow there progress through a project, and it is fun for the students. Students today are vet comfortable with twittering and adding to the classroom as a learning tool would only increase their interest. They are growing up with the technology and to actively engage them in the classroom, we have to introduce new forms of technology and Twitter shows great potential.

Social Networking

Classroom 2.0- I found that this site could be very useful and holds a great deal of potential for any teacher. I liked that there was a forum on the site that allowed teachers to ask for help from others on the site about projects that they want to do or about technology that is out there and how it can improve a lesson. It was very easy for me to navigate my way through the site. I was able to search the site by either a subject area or by a certain tool that I may want to use within the classroom. The site also provided the users with other links to sites that would allow the user to learn about different types of technology that is out there.

The site could be a great place to build up any educators social network, they have a large number of people as members who all seem to be willing to help out one another. I would enjoy using the forum to ask about how to properly use technology in a lesson.

The site also allows you to join numerous other groups that are related to education and technology. Once again it is a great place to begin social networking. I would start off with the "Beginner Group" but hopefully shortly after that I would be on my way to join numerous others.

The Learner's of Today

Today's learners are very complex and very adaptive. They have grown up in a world that is full of technology that is ever changing and evolving, so I am going to stay with the technology theme and say today's learners are like small search engines. They are their own google. Students today will obtain important information or knowledge from a wide variety of learning experiences, whether they are informal or formal learning experiences. Then when they need some type of information, they will search back through their learning experiences to find the most relevant piece of knowledge or information to help them out. Search engines are similar in that they will search through thousands of websites that contain a vast amount of information and will present the user with the most relevant sites for their search.
The information that is retained within the learner and the search engines also in a constant state of change. Information that is regularly used and correct is kept and easily remembered, as with a search engine that information is presented first. While knowledge and information that is not used regularly or is not relevant to a situation, is harder to retain or forgotten by a learner. With a search engine this type of information is presented last or not at all. The learner's of today, like search engines, have "The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information..." and learner's, and to a smaller extent search engines, should also have "The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical"
Today's learners are similar to search engines because they both are able to look for new knowledge from a wide variety of sources and determine what is important and what is unimportant, then determine how to use it properly.