Incorporating+Social+Media

Blue font - Anthony Ferrare Red font- Kathleen Weaver

When a school district decides to incorporate social media into their curriculum, there are three stages of professional development that must take place. We will describe each stage on this page and provide examples of what the incorporation of social media may look like.

Stage 1 - Recognition - The first stage of incorporating social media in a school district is helping the teachers and staff of a district to recognize that there is a need for these technologies in education. I have included two videos below that a district can show their employees so that they buy into and recognize the need for social media and technology in education. I agree. In addition to these people,school boards need to become aware of this necessity as they determine our financial expenditures.

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Stage 2 - Education - The second stage of incorporating social media in a school district is educating the professionals about social media. This stage should involve bringing in a social media in education expert to make a presentation to professionals during an inservice. The two videos below show examples of what this presentation may look like. They are intended for administration, teachers, teachers's assistants. This stage will make sure that employees are given a brief crash course on different social media websites and their possible uses. Having such professionals brought in would be essetial for those teachers who fear the fast pace of the ever growing progress in technology. If the educators felt confident, the excitement for their students learning would as well. media type="youtube" key="qQPe8bNnjx4" height="315" width="420"media type="youtube" key="8KfMg2b20rU" height="315" width="560"

Stage 3 - Implementation - The third stage is the one that can make or break the social media experiment in a school district. Each district needs to find a teacher or group of teachers that become the experts for the district. These teachers must oversee the implementation of the social media in the schools. They must always be available for technological support when other teachers are experiencing problems with the social media. This teacher can also encourage teachers to use social media through making everyone aware of new lessons that other teachers implement using social media.

*One disclaimer to this page is that the district board of education and the administration must all be supportive of the implementation of social media and the school district must have the necessary resources to implement a highly technological curriculum.

**Effective Professional Development to Teachers About Incorporating Social Media (Kathy)** When researching and searching some sites about this topic, I was amazed at the amount of sites and ideas to help teachers. The one site listed below (100 Inspiring Ways...) made me think that if professional development funds are short, teachers could research and almost present to their colleagues this information.

Each site/article has something to offer to help us develop our social media teaching skills.

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