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Social networking is often a term that is held to be synonymous with Facebook, but this is not the case. Social networking is merely a platform to build social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections. This means many online services could qualify as social networking tools. Outside of Facebook, how can these tools be used in the classroom to help facilitate learning? A large part of the effectiveness of these tools are their ability to facilitate collaboration with students or peers outside of the classroom. This type of collaboration gives your students a more authentic audience that goes a long way to keeping them motivated and interested in the activities they normally find tedious, like writing.
Below is a lesson idea that uses social networking tools.
E-pals for your Classroom
E-pals for your Classroom
E-pals are the Internet version of pen pals. An activity like this one connects your students with another group of students of the same age and grade in another part of the world. As long as your e-pals speak the same language, this connection can be used for a variety of tasks: exchanging letters as emails or messages, video conferencing, and collaborating on projects or written work. This activity is a year-long collaboration effort between your class and another in another part of the world. While this activity is infinitely variable and adaptable to the nature of your class and kids, the following steps are the most logical way to go about it.
1. Getting Your E-pals
The first step to working with e-pals is finding some. There are several ways to do this. Use one of the resources below to connect with another teacher who has a class of students you can collaborate with.
e-Pals Global Community - This website allows teachers to sign up and post their class's information. All profiles are searchable allowing you to easily find the perfect match for your class.
Twitter - Twitter allows easy contact with a huge community of teachers. Take some time to build your network and following then blast a request for an e-pal classroom for your kids. More often than not your calls are answered. My Twitter account.
Teacher's Corner also offers a searchable database of pen pal requests.
While pen pals traditionally exchange letters via snail mail, with technology today there is no reason t wait so long to get replies from your pals. Exchange letters with your collaborating class by exchanging messages using one of the services below.
Email - If your students and those of your collaborating class have email accounts, this is a great way for students to exchange messages. One problem with this method is the inability for you to monitor communications. A good work around for this issue is the use of accounts created using the plus-one hack for Gmail.
e-Pals - If you have an e-Pals account, you can create accounts for students in your class which they can use to send messages to their e-pals in your collaborating class.
Facebook or Google+ - While most elementary school students are too young to use social networking sites like Facebook and Google+, middle school kids have this option. Use Facebook's Groups feature to create a private group for the students in your e-pal group. Students an then easily post letters and receive replies from many different users in the group. Google+ allows similar capabilities with Circles. This is a great solution if most of your students are already on Facebook and using it regularly. Facebook group for Happy Kids's Middle School Program.
3. Video Conference
Once your students have been communicating frequently with their e-pals, and they are getting to know each other, you can explore the option of doing a video conference with your collaborating class. While there are time zone and scheduling issues involved with this activity, it can be an excellent opportunity for your students to communicate synchronously ad have a live discussion about a variety of topics. If time zone and scheduling are a problem, it is also possible to share video communication by recording and uploading videos to a shared/public YouTube channel or Wikispaces page. These resources are effective for video conferencing:
Skype - the old standby for video conferencing. It's quality has been lacking recently, but it is still the most popular. Just sign up for an account, share with your collaborating class, and call.
Google Hangouts - Google Hangouts are a feature of Google+ that allow users to have video conferences. It tends to be faster and more versatile than Skype, but has the disadvantage of not working well for users in Mainland China and other countries that block Google products.
2. Exchange Letters
4. Collaborate on Projects
After you have developed your relationship with your collaborating class, work with your cooperating teacher to come up with a project your kids can collaborate on together. This project can be anything from collaborative writing, website building, or even video production, but you must use tools that can allow your students to collaborate and easily work together on the same tasks and documents. Below are just a few tools and ideas that can be used for this part of the activity.
Google Sites or a blog for students to complete some kind of collaborative journaling or writing project. Here is an example from my Middle School class.
Wikispaces page for collaborative writing projects like newspapers, encyclopedia or dictionary entries, or story writing.
Google Drive allows the collaboration on a great many types of documents and tasks. Students must have Google Accounts to collaborate using these tools.
Mixed Ink allows for collaborative writing and sharing.
We Video is an online video creation, editing, and collaborating tool. Your students can use it to collaborate on video projects.
5. Conclusion
The lesson activities described above are meant to be part of a year-long collaboration project with another class in another part of the world. Time each month will need to be devoted periodically to the completion of tasks related to this lesson. For this lesson to work, you and the teacher you are cooperating with must be in constant communication and agreement about the goals and activities for this project. The objectives for a lesson like this vary for each class participating. While you may just be wanting your students to get some extra writing practice, you cooperating teacher may be wanting her students to learn more about Taiwanese/Chinese culture. Make sure each teacher is up front with their expectations and goals.
It is also a good idea to do a final reflection activity at the end of the year to give students an opportunity to reflect on what they learned or gained from interacting with their e-pals. This can be done individually in class, or you can make this another collaborative activity done with your e-pals. A idea for collaboration on this would be to record student interviews using either Voicethread or YouTube and then post them online for our e-pals to see. Sharing reflections is a good opportunity for students to learn how everyone experiences the same activity and interaction in a different way. Plus, it will be fin way to cap off the year!
Important reminder before attempting any of the activities above: always test out technology resources before using them in the classroom. If you can't work them, neither will your students. Make sure the program serves the purpose of your activity. If it doesn't, search for a new tool or method to meet your objectives.
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