J.P. Prezzavento - The Bits and Bytes of Education:

For the past two years, I have maintained Facebook pages for both my Language Arts 1 and Language Arts 2 classes.  While I don't have 100% participation from my student and parents, the students and parents who do use the pages have found them to be very useful communication tools.  Like any tool, it took some experimenting for me to make the most of my page, but once I got familiar with the some of the features of Facebook Pages, my class pages have become very beneficial to me as a classroom teacher. Here are my 5 best practices for maintaining a classroom Facebook. 1.  Fan Polls One of my favorite features of Facebook Pages is the polling options.  I like using polls to get feedback on activities and to let students vote for future projects.  Not only does this let me get student opinions and feedback, but also it increases traffic to my Facebook page and gives students an opportunity to be engaged with the page. To use the poll feature on F...

One of my favorite type of activities to do with students in my 9th and 10th grade language arts classes is to incorproate social media into lessons.  I like to have students make Facebook pages for characters in stories, create Twitter feeds for characters and write blog posts that allow them to compare issues in a text with issues that are faced in our society today.  While this all sounds great in practice, I quickly learned that making my dream of seamless socian media integreation  into a reality was a little harder than I thought it would be. To combat the lack of technology and firewall issues that  have stopped me from incorporating Twitter, Facebook and blogging into my classes, I have come up with low-tech paper-and-pencil replacements.  Below are three sample low-tech activities I do with my students in place of their web-based counterparts.  Click on the name of each project to view the handout for each project. R+J 140 http://goo.gl/Q...

After talking with a colleague recently at lunch and looking through my Twitter feed for the last six months or so, I started to wonder why more teachers don't supplement their daily lessons with technology.  I have found and implemented a number of new resources to help my students, and I'm surprised that more teachers haven't joined me yet.  Throughout our conversation and during my 45 minutes on the treadmill that afternoon I came up with a few reasons why teachers stray away from the integration of technology and possible solutions to get our colleagues on board with technology.  1.  Teacher Apathy I despise the thought that this is a viable reason for avoiding technology, but let's face it, some educators have been in the profession for that magic number of years that makes them believe that they have found the perfect way of educating each student.  Their perfect way happens to be lecturing for 40 minutes each day, but that's neither here nor there....

The popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, coupled with high-tech video games and 21 st century entertainment for our students outside of school is necessitating a change in the way we as educators prepare and present information to our students.  Gone are the days where we can get away with 50 minutes of lecturing.  Our students are watching engaging Youtube videos and reading Facebook statuses to get their information instead of reading magazines and waiting for their favorite shows to come on TV.  Today’s students want their classroom experience to be as engaging as their lives outside of school.  The only problem is that most of us did not grow up in the same technological age as our students.  Integrating technology into your daily plans can be a very daunting task for an educator who is not familiar with Web 2.0 tools.  Here are 5 tips that will help you start using technology in your classes.  1- Get comf...