Final Thoughts of Social Learning

Social networking has made a difference in my classroom. I am now bringing in more outside sources to reinforce the lesson or idea that is being taught in my class. These are the bits of the course that my students discuss with fellow students. An example of this is when I showed my students the whirlpool that was formed from the earthquake in Japan. I had students come into the class later in the day and asked to see the video that their buddies where talking about at lunch. These are the things the students remember not the equation for Ohm's Law. By incorporating these 21st century tools students born and raised in this century can connect and relate to these things. Connecting to students using current technology helps them view myself as a teacher willing to try to use the technology they use in their daily lives. Also finding the feed on twitter from the national geological society posting all the earthquakes happening everyday helps students realize the earth is in a constant mode of change. Still two weeks after I showed them this feed the first thing we do in class is look at what parts of the globe experienced earthquakes over the last 24 hours. Overall social networking has broaden my views of where to look for resources and ideas to use in my class.
I plan on continuing my social networking after this class is over. I will continue to bookmark helpful sites in my Delicious site and share the site with my fellow teachers. I have had several request to use some of my sites I found in other teachers class because their students asked them about the sites they learned about from my students. Delicious is a great place to save Internet sites that I  have found and I can go back to a month or year from now and rediscover that information. On a personal side I hate to say it but I am addicted to twitter for all the Husker football information that I can find in one place. I catch myself checking out my tweek deck several times a day looking for newly posted information.
I see the online education community changing the culture of education down to its bones. This is the current fight education is in right now. One side is educators embracing online resources and showing how it can be use successfully inside the classroom. On the other side you have educators stuck in their ways in thinking that this new wave of ideas is just crazy and has no place inside their classroom. I personally have had old school teachers come up to me and ask why I am doing this or that with the Internet and I tell them this is how are students are learning these days. The ability to interact and get feed back from not only your students but leaders in fields of the topics that you are discussing instantly is awesome. This is something that was impossible 20 years ago now every class room has the ability to talk and discuss ideas and issues with people a town, state, or country away right now is incredible. Until we as a educational community as a whole embraced social networking there is always going to be problems. But when we do embrace it (I believe someday down the road we all will) the benefits will be grand, and we will look  back and say we should have done this long ago.

Austin Zeimet
This could be the most typing I have done since my last final I did in college. My fingers and mind are tired.