Social Networking & Learning

After a busy with my fabulous new group of PCET students I began to reflect on the day’s activities. The course I am teaching is a 7 day intensive ICT module for teaching and learning. The students are very eager, interesting and interested and so a pleasure to engage with. Their ICT skills range as you would expect from any new group of people, but what they do share is their understanding that ICT is a valuable teaching and learning tool. We learned such a lot together yesterday.

The main aspect of the day was to discuss the place of social networking in education, in particular to aid reflective practice. My challenge, however, is to teach the students about applications that they can use in their teaching and learning, without keeping them too long on the computers, as the course is all day! Ideally the discussions would have taken place on the forum setup on Moodle our university VLE. So, to avoid over use of the technology, they used felt pens and sheets of A3, with pleasure I might add. The downfall was that there was no record after they fed back their group responses as there would have been on the forum. The forum would also have allowed for follow-up contributions and reflections, but it was a necessary sacrifice for my group’s well-being.

We had lots of issues setting up blogs using Blogger. The main issue, which I suppose is really intended to be an asset, was that fact Blogger constantly encourages sharing with Google+. I wanted to keep things simple and separate but these days it is getting harder to do. The bonus with all the instant linking is that you are sharing your information with your ‘circles’ as they are called in Google+ and they can easily be linked to your Facebook and Twitter friends and followers. You just need to be aware of this and to be sure that it is what you really want. My advice is that you don’t rush setting up these new accounts and that you read all the pop-ups so that you don’t accidentally share!