Stephanie Feeman Education 776 Blog

As I reflect back on the last two years of my school at Dominican University, it has always been in the back of my head whether or not I will stick with this after all of the classes are done. I am at the end of this path and integrating social media into my classroom has never sounded more necessary. I have found so many awesome resources that could possibly change the way that students learn. Not only that, but the way that I communicate information with parents and community members could be completely different. I had recently learned about the Remind App to communicate with parents. This changed the way I communicated with parents, but through this class I found even more social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Edmodo that would be beneficial as well. Moving forward, I'd like to look into transforming some of my current classroom interventions into technology based interventions. I'd also like to streamline some of communication with families and community member...

photo attributed to psychcentral.com This week we had the opportunity to unpack Rheingold's 5 different social media literacies. He described them as attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption. I think all of these areas are incredibly important but the two that stuck out to me the most were attention and collaboration. These are two areas I think of most when I think of my own students. When we are working through curriculum and instruction whether it is with technology or traditional classroom setting, these two areas I feel are the most important. When you integrate technology into the classroom, attention becomes an area that students can begin to struggle with. I do a large amount of my interventions through apps like MobyMax. It is often really hard for me to tell if students are giving their full attention to the activities within the program. I often get information back from the activities that do not match what I know their ...

Photo attributed to Pinterest.Com This week in class we took a deeper look into the laws surrounding keeping our students safe and knowledgeable when working on the internet. I had actually never heard of these laws before, and had no clue that these kinds of laws were in place. I know that my school has all of the documents required through these laws in place, but I always thought it was just common sense and our responsibility as educators. I like the idea of having these laws in place, but I just find it so hard to enforce when not inside the school the setting. We have site blocks and intensively teach about internet etiquette, but so many of our kiddos go home and have no censors and are exposed to things that are so inappropriate. In the light of the recent news in Florida, I can't help but think there could be something more we could do to help students and young children not have access to those kinds of terrible sites. I believe in the freedom of internet sites, but I...

photo courtesy of imgflip When I think of Digital Tattoos, I always think back to the people who choose to put their entire life on the internet for everyone to see. My meme that I created shares my opinion on the matter. I have a social media app called Timehop that pulls up old pictures and social media posts from years past. I am always so embarrassed by the song lyrics and awkward teenage quotes that I find that I shared over the years. I then remember that I started social media when I was still in high school, and the social media universe was a very different thing. I am now much smarter about what I choose to post on different social media platforms. However, I still see people I am friends with write and post the most ridiculous things on their social media accounts. I'm often times unsure if they got the digital tattoo memo that everything you post on the internet stays there forever no matter what you try to do. I have this same conversation with my Jr. High basket...

photo attributed to Speak Up This week we needed to look up information pertaining to the use of social media and technology within the classroom. I was shocked at what I found. The above infographic was most interesting to me. This infographic shows data and information from 2016. This is one of the first years that I started teaching. I really don't have a reference from before then, so the data here was most interesting to me. Check out these inforgraphics! The first statistic that I found was #3. This data said that 64% of teachers use videos to support learning goals. As I was going through my undergrad and practicing writing lesson plans, technology was always used to grab attention and keep students engaged. It is shocking to me to see that just over half of the teachers in the United States are implementing videos and other technology to better round out their lesson. I use videos on a daily basis, usually more than one time a day. It helps students hear the informati...