Today I tried to place into words what has merely been running through my head. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that things aren’t quite real until you’ve expressed them to others. I may think in my head that I’d like to run off and join the circus, but until I put voice to that thought, share this idea with others, engage in discussion and debate, it remains a whisper, floating around.
In saying this, I can’t help but apply it to my students. Far too often, their only form of publishing is within the classroom. In some ways, this may not be much better than in their heads. Try as I can to value their work, I am only one voice. They may eventually share the work with their parents, a few friends, although I do wonder at the statistics on doing so.
For my inquiry, I would like to look at using social media as a way to connect students to the world. The world has changed so much since I was a student, with many more avenues for connections, yet many classrooms remain unchanged. Social media being a rather large environment, I think I may end up focusing on Twitter, as previously mentioned.
What I’d really like to do is explore the whys of doing so. Why should I use Twitter with my students. With every how that I encounter or conjure, I’d like to look at a reason for why. Some of these reasons will hopefully be backed by research stating why it is important to engage a student in a particular task. Some of the reasons may be based on BC curriculum. And perhaps there may be a study out there that actually looked at the benefits of social media use for students.
I plan to look at my inquiry through the mindset of creating a presentation for
my peers. Consistently when I attend tech Pro-D within my district, they speak of all the wonderful things that we can do… and how it engages students, and how much they enjoy it. I’d like to create a better WHY. Why are we doing this? What is the benefit? How does it improve the minds of our students? How is it different than traditional methods?
Why do I get the feeling this could be a large research study, not a week and a half project? Eek!
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I often think about the huge stores of human potential sitting in classrooms for hours a day, producing materials for the eyes of one person, to acquire a mark, and move on. I wonder what would happen in our educational institutions actually harnessed the youthful energy of our youngest citizens to research the most perplexing problems of our time. What would it be like to be an early reader who is reading out loud over Skype to an Alzheimer’s patient in a long term care facility? What would it be like to be a middle school student learning dog handling and dog safety preparatory to volunteering at a local dog shelter to ensure the dogs are adequately trained and walked so they are more adoptable? What would it be life if our secondary students teamed up with community members to transform lawns into herb gardens are salad gardens? At the least, I believe the work students undertake in educational institutions should be considered real work for the public good. Their learning makes a difference to the quality of life in our communities. They should be able to experience that as a real, tangible result of their efforts.