Social Networking Technologies

www.edmodo.com

The first social networking site I will introduce is Edmodo. With Edmodo, teachers can connect with other teachers to share lessons and ideas, see what others in the field are doing in class, get ideas and feedback on them.  It is also a secure place for teachers to connect with their students to share content, homework, grades, class discussions and notifications by sharing a 6 digit group code. Teachers can also lock the group to avoid other people to use the password to enter the group, which is a great feature for a secure networking site. Once you sign up as a teacher with an email account you may create a group on Edmodo and give the 6 digit group code to your students to use it when they create an account for themselves. Edmodo seems to be a great social networking site for foreign language classes improving the writing skills of learners through writing projects, discussions, and debates in small groups. Class blogs would be a great tool to share comments, reflections on the day, on a text or an article read in class. Rather than having learners write a reflection paper on a text they have read in class, I would post questions to guide them to reflect on the text. This would also enable them to see what they each wrote and promote discussion. I would also use Edmodo to start debates in small groups. Two educators can also connect their students for discussions improving their language skills. With Edmodo, learners can connect to other students around the world, which would certainly increase learners’ self-esteem and communication skills in this free practice opportunity. You may find out more ideas on http://help.edmodo.com/teachers/teacher-rollout-resources/twenty-ways-to-use-edmodo/
 

The second technology I have explored is Sophia. Sophia is an educational platform where experts, and educators share their knowledge on a variety subjects such as English, Fine Arts, Mathematics, World Languages and the like. Once you have registered, you can create tutorials, provide ratings and reviews, post questions, answer questions, and also follow other users, and save the results of your learning preference assessment, earn points on quizzes, create.  Communication among the group members is only visible to that certain group so it would be a great training tool for teachers in a department. For instance, working with 100 teachers, we hardly collaborate or share our lessons. Everyone , especially the novice ones, would benefit a lot from the tutorials we created related to their field of our expertise and the site provides users with free screencasting for this. These tutorials would serve as training materials or used with learners who have missed a class. I have found so many useful reading strategies proposed and I would definitely use them before I do reading strategies training in class. I would choose the ones I want my learners to watch to determine which strategies they already use. Knowing what they know would help me plan my lessons accordingly. You can explore this site on www.sophia.org