Fountain of Youth: Reflections on Teaching Uses of Social Tech to Young Teachers

Spent the evening leading my weekly Social Tech in Ed class.

And they are starting to get it.

We've shifted gears from demonstrations of how to use the tech and sessions building PLNs to the hard and vital work of actually integrating SM into daily classroom teaching and learning.

And I am so impressed with how far these young teachers have come in five weeks.

Some of you will remember the "I am scared of Twitter" teacher I mentioned several weeks back. Well, now she's taking part in Tweeted ed discussions and seamlessly using Twitter to complement our f2f classroom discussions. A young teacher who slammed Second Life as useless a while back just stopped by after class to talk about ways he wants to use it to simulate museum education in his classroom. Today, the teachers took the role of students in a social tech integrated AP English classroom; and to a person, even the most self-described 'math'-minded (as well as those just shy to speak) blogged beautiful reflections on the structure and meaning of T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'.

This is the power of social tech in action. And this is why I am so committed to teaching it's application to teachers.

Because we need our teachers to understand that it's not about 'using tech', but rather is about fully engaging in the reality of the 21st century. And we need them to understand that -- if anything -- social tech is a fountain of youth when it comes to learning and ideas.

Let's encourage teachers to drink from this fountain and re-enliven their teaching and learning.

I certainly don't mind handing out the cups.

JHU Social Tech and Education

Everyone is welcome to check this out (it's the homework for my social tech in ed / paperless classroom students... we just finished our first class).

1. Complete Weebly homepage; you should have pages for 'news', 'twitter feed', and 'social media links' -- please comment below with the url of your published page.

2. Get on Twitter, add me, follow folks who were part of our conversation (you can find the conversation by searching @TeachPaperless ) -- I expect to see you Tweeting no less than two or three times a day; you get out of the network what you put into the network.

3. Start Diigo account. Go to Weblogg-ed, find an article you fancy, and leave public comment annotations.

4. Go to Blogger.com , sign up and start a new blog. Make at least one post on your impressions of the video and your impressions of what this class is going to be like (and feel free to be cruel... just be cool).

See you in a week... (actually will probably see you on Twitter).