New Social Networking Site Helps Teachers Create and Share Lessons
This past week I finally had a chance to mess around with the curriculum sharing platform BetterLesson, and I thought I’d share my thoughts. The new social networking site is designed to help teachers create, organize and share lesson plans. Unlike traditional curriculum sharing websites, BetterLesson incorporates a unique curriculum organizing and filing system that enables teachers to easily create, store, and share information related to lessons they create. According to BetterLesson, the product enables teachers to organize and share their entire curriculum for a particular...
Read MoreShould Schools Block Social Networking Sites?
Over the past five years, the response of most school administrators to social networking sites– YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.– is simply to restrict access on campus. In a recent piece in Slate, Nicholas Bramble argues it’s time to open access to these sites. Rather than worry about the potential, and often times very serious, concerns teachers and site administrators usually have with this technology, Bramble argues schools need to tap “the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media” and channel it toward promoting...
Read MoreProtecting Your Privacy on Facebook
In an attempt to compete with more open social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook’s management made an important and very controversial decision in December to change the privacy settings for the popular social networking site. In a recent piece in ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez makes a few helpful recommendations users should take to protect their privacy on Facebook. 1. Who can see the things you share (status updates, photos, videos, etc.)? “Probably the most critical of the “privacy” changes (yes, we mean those quotes sarcastically) was the change made to...
Read MoreDude!
Man, I guess Twitter really is a brain drain! By the way, I just woke up, and I guess I should do some work…
Read MoreUsing Facebook to Improve School Communication
Facebook has become an essential tool for young adults to stay in contact with friends and family and to create a sense of community with their peers. For school administrators, then, utilizing Facebook to improve communication and to create an interactive experience for their school community only makes sense. While many secondary schools continue to utilize basic Web 1.0 website technology to communicate with parents, students, and the broader community, most of the people schools are trying to reach, particularly the students and parents, rely on Web 2.0 technology like Facebook to share...
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