Teachers and Social Networking

Hi!

I am taking a class this fall (composition instruction) as part of my certification to be endorsed to teach secondary English. Within this class, students have to write articles with the focus of getting these articles published in journals or other educational news outlets.

I am looking to write an article on how teachers use social networking in their classrooms/schools and how this has changed their teaching. I am also interested in how teachers connect with professional development through social networking and how this has changed the way they connect with other teachers or colleagues in their buildings. I would like to interview teachers who have experience with this.

Please either respond to this post or send me a message in classroom 2.0 if you are interested in participating.

Thanks so much!

Darcie Priester

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Rita Oates on September 19, 2011 at 3:48pm

You could talk to a lot of teachers who have connected through the world's largest network of K12 teachers, ePals.

Teachers of English language who are outside the English-speaking world (think China, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, etc.) are very eager to connect their students with native English-speaking students.

Perhaps an interesting focus for your story might be the "teaching of English" and how US teachers could have their students help students in other places learn English and American ways of speaking and writing. Here are examples from gr. 1-2, middle school, and high school.

One example is a primary teacher in Colorado who connected for a year with a gr. 1-2 English as a Second Language class in Beirut, Lebanon. These teachers won the Microsoft Innovative Educator award for North America.

Here are links to their info:

Cheryl Arnett and Rawya Shatila
Sunset Elementary School and Makassed Khalil Shehab School
Digital Stories: A Celebration of Learning and Culture
See Cheryl and Rawya's project description and video »
See student work »

Another is a middle school teacher of English in Israel, Marsha Goren. She has done lots of projects with multiple classrooms. Here's one:

Marsha Goren
Ein Ganim School
Global Dreamers Peace Project
See Marsha's project description and video »
See student work »

She also developed and led a road safety project with middle school students in multiple countries:

http://www.epals.com/blogs/teacherspotlight/archive/2011/06/16/road...

Here's another teacher, Candace Pauchnick, who teaches high school English and sociology in San Diego, who has connected for the past eight years with a teacher of English in China. Their students do email, skype, and more to practice English language skills with an authentic audience of peers. This is a session she did at CUE 2009 conference in Palm Springs, California, that was chosen to be recorded:

“San Diego, China and Others Collaborate through Email, Blogs, and Web Conferences” Candace shares highlights of her years of experience pairing her students in San Diego with students in China and many other places. She provides a lot of practical suggestions for using blogs and pen pals with students in a high school classroom. The first 29 minutes are one presentation, and after that is a second presentation, both about how she uses ePals in different settings. 53:00 minutes (two presentations in one-hour time slot)
https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?ps...

Teachers can join ePals for free and can get SchoolMail accounts for their students also for free.

ePals also created a powerful learning platform called LearningSpace. It's what the International Baccalaureate uses to connect teachers and students in 140 countries. See a short video: http://bit.ly/IBvideo The site for IB participants: http://ibo.epals.com

Good luck with getting an article published!

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Permalink Reply by Darcie Priester on September 22, 2011 at 4:19pm

Thanks so much for your reply. I appreciate all the information. I am interested in the aspects you talked about where teachers are connecting with others in different countries.

Thanks for responding!