Social Media in classroom? Not in my school (come on…)

Social media is all around us lately.

We share everything, know everything about people around us, we learn online, work online and shop online, it only seemes natural that social media will also be a part of our educational life.

I find it rather strange that many schools discourage the use of it. I find it even more strange that in my degree – Instructional Design degree, lecturers still fight student about the use of laptops in classrooms, it’s absolutely absurd!

What are they so afraid of?

This post tries to help educators in overcoming this fear and also giving some excellent tips for integrating social media in classroom.

Another great post gives examples of possible use of social media for different types of learning – this is actually a very useful tool.

Via Mashable and C4LPT

Enjoy!

Social Media & Learning – So Natural

This semester we started working on our seminar project.  As a really enthusiastic Twitter user and an Instructional Design student, it only seemed natural for me to check the great potential of using Twitter for Learning.

This idea actually came to me when I first started to notice that I use Twitter for learning. I used HootSuite to track keywords on subjects that I care about such as web design, instructional design, UI, e-learning and many more. This helped me meet people from these areas and learn much more about these subjects from reading their Tweets. Then I started creating  lists for each subject, and the knowledge came flowing in.

I guess the more you learn to use Twitter and its many applications and advantages, the more it gets clear that there’s a big potential for using it for learning.

This week we received a green light from our lecturer, so now there’s a lot of reading to do. I found this nice post with 100 inspiring ways to use social media in the classroom – some really good ideas.

We have a few ideas in mind for our research, but we still have some time until we actually set the research. So if you have any ideas or stories about using social media for learning, I would really love to hear them!

Social Media Buttons – Make a set of your own!

We all love to add social media buttons, whether it’s to our Facebook page, Twitter, website, blog and so on.

We want people to know us and also know where they can find us, we also use it as a tool to promote ourselves – our companies, blogs and websites.

Most of us simply choose one of many great beautiful sets of buttons that are offered in the net – there are so many possibilities and all are nice and attractive, but what about some creativity and uniqeness?

Here is a great well-detailed tutorial to help you create your very own stylish set!

Good Luck

Via raster rebels