Module 41

Reflection on Social Media use for Module 41

I have definitely gained a better understanding of how to use Social Media to my advantage when looking up resources and information in general for teaching.  Weather it be for Education Technology or Pedagogy in general, there was always a vast amount of information that could be found by exploring Websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Webinars to discover by gaining access to apps like Any Meeting.   
Hash tags are something I have heard about before, but have not used in my daily life up until this assignment.  I will for sure be putting these to good use in the future as a teacher.  They did come with some challenges though.  I spent a good couple of hours or so just adjusting to the fact you aren’t always going to find something useful on every hash tag for education you look up.  Whereas hash tags such as #k12 and # edchat for twitter were extremely useful, others such as #Aledchat and #luthed were not so useful or completely outdated.  One of the biggest challenges I faced at the start was trying to sift through the # live chats that were still available and finding some that hadn’t already expired.
Another challenge I had, and noticed that Luansha also had in hers, was the language barrier.  She posted on the forum that she had had some hash tags come up in a different language so she wasn’t able to process all of the material.  I too had a similar challenge like this when I decided to join a live chat just to find the entire thing was in Spanish.  Youna’s solution to use Hashtagify was a great solution to this problem of another language.  With this you are able to translate the hash tag back to English to find out what it means.  Sometimes finding just the right hash tag or live education chat was a tough process as well, but the more I got used to these websites, the easier it became to narrow my focus on the ones that mattered and the ones I could get the most out of.  
When I made my post about getting students to turn in their homework on time I was responded to by a couple of teachers with concise suggestions on how they deal with overcoming these challenges.  One stated to just focus on grading the unit assessments and not the homework for the majority of her classes.  This is something i have not tried before but may consider for a couple of my older classes that don’t turn in their homework efficiently all of the time.  
Another mentioned the difference between Summative Assessments and Formative Assessments.  The information on how she used Formative Assessments with students was one that I could really consider with my students and something I hope to implement soon.
The live Webinar I attended on the challenges of building a website I also thought was quite intriguing.  It brought up problems I hadn’t payed much attention to before such as embedding certain links, movable icons on the page that can distract, and also being more descriptive with your page titles.  The comparison of the old website and the new one was nice to look at to see how they tackled these problems to make their website better and gave me some insight on how to improve upon my own
All in all i really enjoyed this assignment of getting introduced to using Social Media as a tool for education.  Going broader and participating in the Community Forum was a great experience, and I learned a lot from the live chats and Webinars I attended throughout the week.  I will continue to make use of the Social media tools to make my teaching better in the future for sure.