I don’t even know how to start with the article on ways teachers can implement Facebook into the classroom or with the article on resources for Twitter. My main questions is why do we want to do that? The things that seem most reasonable, for example, asking other educators for lesson ideas, seems like common sense, not something that needs to be on a list. Maybe it’s because I’m young and these articles are for an older generation but almost all the ideas seem blatantly obvious or are better utilized with other ways on the internet. It’s also especially hard to understand that Twitter article. Every link leads to more link and not much information.
Some of the problematic things from the Facebook article that I found are as follows:
“Ask for information: Instead of trusting Wikipedia ask your peers”. Wait, what!? I understand that your peers might know more about specific things than Wikipedia but maybe they don’t. Why should you trust them? You have to fact check them anyway and where are you going to do that? Probably on the internet somewhere or hopefully, through a peer reviewed article or book on the subject. This leads me to believe you may have been better off going there in the first place.
“Learning Games”. I’m sure there are educational games on Facebook, but I’m also relatively sure there are other places with better games that don’t provide such a strong impulse to do other things and get distracted. Why play an education game on Facebook when you can just chat with your friend or post status updates? There is just too much temptation there.
“Investigate ‘Dog ate my homework’ claims” A teacher busted her student for posting to facebook when she said she had no internet access?! This seems like spying and I really think there is a better use of a teacher’s time. If you choose not to believe a student, then don’t believe them, but I don’t like the idea of a teacher snooping on all her students’ profiles, looking to catch them in a lie.
Like I said before, none of the things on this list, besides the Facebook only apps, are best done on Facebook. I can think of better ways to do them all.
However, I did enjoy the article about opportunities for tech ed to develop children’s curiosity. I like the fact that the author wrote about how there is a destructive tendency amongst “learning” games just throwing in facts in a game without any context does not really teach anything but rote memorization.
It’s interesting that touch technology is beneficial to children that wouldn’t have been able to play these games before now can. I was unaware that just because a child doesn’t have the motor skills to play a video game, doesn’t mean that they can’t understand the process.
I was also surprised about how much the author believed in math. I didn’t know that math could “predicts academic performance” or improves literacy. To me those things are so far apart and I haven’t seen much use from my own education in math in my day to day life, so it made me curious about the data. It also seemed a strange way to end the article.
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