Reflection

This course has been one of the most useful and beneficial courses I have taken in working toward my M.E.T. degree.  It was not an easy course by any means, especially taking it in the condensed format of the summer semester, but looking back over the past 7 weeks at everything I’ve learned and created has made me very glad I took this course.  We learned so much about so many different forms of social media that it will take me a while to really figure out which sites/applications I want to incorporate in my classroom and for professional development purposes.  Before taking this course I knew very little about social media.  Beyond having a personal Facebook page that I rarely use, I really never used social media personally or professionally.  

While there are so many great applications of social media in the classroom I have come to see that it favors some subjects more than others.  The applications in English and history classes are almost overwhelming, but when it comes to math (especially high school math), they seem much more limited both in variety and in quantity.  There are certainly ideas for incorporating social media into math classrooms, but considering the already incredibly limited amount of time I have to get through the basic curriculum and prepare my students for all of the new Common Core testing requirements unfortunately seems to leave little room for incorporating some of the types of projects I have found.  The smaller applications, like communicating with students outside of class via Twitter or a class site such as a Facebook page seem more manageable to me at this point, but I hope that as I continue to use social media I can progressively include more avenues.

Even though I don’t see myself become a social media guru in the classroom anytime soon, I am very excited about the professional development opportunities and resources I have learned about in this course.  From webinars to Google+ groups to following hashtags using Tweetdeck, I have seen so many different types of professional development options I was not aware of prior to taking this course.  I’m looking forward to expanding my personal learning environment and sharing what I know with my colleagues as a new school year is about to start.

In terms of my blog performance throughout this course I think I have done well.  I’ve never been one to blog for personal use (or professional unless required as part of a course assignment), so it doesn’t come very naturally to me yet.  However, I tried to meet each week’s blog requirements in a thoughtful way.  There may have been assignments where I could have gone more in depth in my blog, but with a brand new baby at home I did the best I could with the time I had available.  Overall I would give myself 70/75 because I feel as though I completed the blogging assignments on-time and to the assignment specifications, but I do see room for improvement.

Social Media Policies

To the best of my knowledge my school and county do not have a social media policy in place. There have definitely been discussion regarding social media, but they seem to be focused on how appropriate use of social media by teachers, or bullying issues between students. It seems like as social media is becoming more and more prevalent a specific policy outlining the counties social media rules and guidelines is important to have. With that being said, since there is no county-wide policy in effect now, I am going to focus more on guidelines I would like to follow for my school or classroom rather than the county as a whole.

For any policy to be effective there must be buy-in from the stakeholders. It is necessary for my students, their parents, and the school administration to all have a part in developing and enforcing the policy. Ideally I think it would be best to have a meeting with parents, students, and administration to collectively create and agree upon the policy. Without support of parents and administration it would almost impossible to enforce any policy, no matter how good the intentions. It would also be important to regularly review and update the policy as social media is constantly changing and the policy needs to be relevant. Policies will be enforced in accordance with the faculty and student handbooks.

The following guidelines are my proposed Social Media Policy for my school:

1. Faculty and staff using social media for school or classroom purposes need to maintain professional social media accounts separate from their personal ones.

2. Official school or student club/organization accounts are permitted but must have the approval of the administration and any use of the account must be monitored and approved by the club/organization’s advisor. This includes sports teams, in which case the coach is considered the advisor.

3. Faculty or staff are responsible for maintaining a professional appearance when using social media, this includes checking for spelling/grammar mistakes as well as appropriate content.

4. All social media accounts should be identifiable to prevent anonymity and increase transparency.

5. Any content determined to be inappropriate will be removed and disciplinary action may be taken in accordance with the faculty and student handbook.

6. Any type of harassment/bullying will be investigated and handled in accordance with the faculty and student handbook.

7. Any dishonest or unethical behavior will be investigated and handled in accordance with the faculty and student handbook.

8. All users of social media need to be knowledgeable of privacy settings to protect personal information.

9. All users of social media should be cognizant of protecting the security of social media accounts by creating strong passwords and routinely changing passwords.

10. All users of social media must respect copyright laws when posting content, and proper attribution should be provided to give credit to the original author or creator.

11. Careful thought and review should be given to any content posted online as once something is online it is almost impossible to remove it completely.

Resources

Anderson, S. (2012, May 7). How to create social media guidelines for your school. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/how-to-create-social-media-guidelines-school

Anderson, S. (2012). Social media guidelines. Edutopia. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/social-media-guidelines-steven-anderson

Hagerstown Community College. Social media at HCC. Retrieved from http://www.hagerstowncc.edu/about/public-information/social-media

Social Media Math Projects

This assignment was particularly difficult for me. We were to find 10-15 projects or case studies related to our content area and grade level that used social media or social networking as a key feature. I am a high school math teacher, so depending on the year I could be teaching Intro to Algebra, Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry, Precalculus, Trigonometry, Calculus, or Statistics, but even with many subject options I still had a difficult time finding actual projects and a couple of the resources I curated are a bit of a stretch or use similar things (Twitter especially). I’ve run into this problem almost every time I try to find relevant examples of using Web 2.0 technologies, and doing this search just made it even more obvious that there is a drastically smaller amount of social media projects for math than for nearly every other major subject. If I were and English or history teacher I would have been set, because almost every project I found was for one of those subjects, even science had more options, but math was very limited. Through this assignment I have learned that social media can be used, but sometimes it’s a bit of a stretch (unless you’re doing probability and statistics, then Twitter is great!). I’m sure as these applications continue to become more prevalent in classrooms there will be more examples and ideas to choose from, but right now it takes a lot of searching and weeding out to find actual social media projects for a high school math classroom.

Here is the link to my curation on Pinterest, and below is the complete list of resources as there were a couple I was unable to pin.

1. http://shegeeks.net/incredibly-unique-twitter-projects-ii/

This site lists a few different projects that use twitter, but the one that is relevant to math is the one using TweetStats. TweetStats allows students to collect data on how and when someone uses Twitter and then analyze the data and draw conclusions or look for correlations.

2. http://hillcrestmsfei.weebly.com/teaching-blog/math-integer-project-student-work

This project uses sites like Go Animate, Jing, and Educreations to help students make videos or cartoons to explain concepts about Integers. The videos can then be shared using YouTube.   Students had the choice on how to display the information to differentiate and allow for creativity, some just did posters, some made raps, but a specific format could be set to require students to use social media.

3. http://mrseteachesmath.blogspot.com/2014/11/awesome-quadrilateral-project.html

This is an interesting Geometry project where students had to use social media (like facebook, instagram, twitter) or create a dating profile for a specific type of quadrilateral. They had to use the dating profile or social media page to explain the properties of the quadrilateral.

4. http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_Group_GeometryBetaTesters/TEDTalkHouseoftheFuture?bc=;Coll_Group_GeometryBetaTesters.CurrikiGeometryResources

This project uses the very popular community of TEDtalks videos (as well as many other online resources such as Khan Academy) to provide students with the background information help them complete this project on geometry properties relating to houses of the future.

5. http://ghs2011.ning.com/group/googleearthinmaths

This project uses blogs and Google Earth. Students create a blog to explain how to use Google Earth to do measurements. They must take screen shots of their work and post and explain on their blog.

6. http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/virtual-field-trips

This project is specifically related to math but depending it could easily be adapted for the math classroom. The project uses Skype or other video conferencing software to allows students to take a virtual field trip or conference with a professional in the field.

7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fco8OwqkCYU

This project uses YouTube as a platform to share rap videos about math. This specific project was creating a rap about Geometry, specifically polygons. There are many other examples of math rap projects using YouTube, but this is one that shows what the project is about.

8. http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/2008/03/07/plan-tweet-teach-tweet-learn-smile/

This project uses Twitter to gather data to help explore and explain probability and statistics. In this case, a teacher asked his twitter network a question about the weather and the class analyzed the responses, but the project could be modified for students to use Twitter.

9. http://realteachingmeansreallearning.blogspot.com/p/facebook-in-math-class.html

This project uses Facebook as the forum to create and answer math questions. Students were given a topic and had (in this case a specific function) and had to use Facebook to explain it.

10. http://realteachingmeansreallearning.blogspot.com/2011/05/twitter-for-math-nerds.html

I was unable to add this project to my curation because when I tried to Pin it, I got an error saying the invalid image data url and there is no image. This project uses Twitter to gather data to use for a regression activity.

11. http://realteachingmeansreallearning.blogspot.com/2011/05/glogging-in-math-class.html

I was unable to add this project to my curation because when I tried to Pin it, I got an error saying the invalid image data url and there is no image. This project has students use Glogster to create a Glob with images, videos, etc about a specific topic (this one is about Trigonometry).

12. http://realteachingmeansreallearning.blogspot.com/2011/03/twitter-like-in-calculus.html

This project has students using Twitter to (or something like it) to ask students questions and force them to really think about their responses in order to be able to explain how to solve a problem in a concise way since their responses are limited to a specific number of characters.

13. http://www.slideshare.net/travelinlibrarian/twenty-five-interesting-ways-to-use-tw

This slideshare lists many projects using twitter, but the couple that particularly relate to math involve using Twitter to collect data, either by asking questions to the students’ twitter networks or using something like twtpoll to collect and analyze data.

Personal Learning Environment

Another part of this week’s assignment was to analyze and diagram our Personal Learning Environment (PLE).  This was an interesting assignment as I had never really thought about how all of the things I do online are related.  Here is what I came up with for my PLE.

After thinking about all the different things I use and/or am a part of I chose three categories to organize.  The first category is “Sharing”.  Almost every one of these could be considered sharing because in some way each one allows for sharing; however, the ones I put in this category were Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, and YouTube because for me, the primary reason I use them is to share what I think and see.  The second category I chose was “Organizing”.  Again, many of these allow one to organize information, but for me, Pinterest, Scoop.it, Diigo, and Delicious are mainly organizational tools.  The last category I chose was “Communities”.  I went back and forth on what to name this and whether or not to separate it between professional and personal communities, but in the end I decided to keep them together.  In my communities category I have Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn, and EdWeb.  For me, the primary reason to join these sites is because they focus on creating communities.  One could make the argument that all of these are communities in one way or another, and I don’t disagree with that, but for the way I use them it is for the community aspect.

In comparing my PLE to those of my classmates I see a lot of similarities.  I compared mine to Jennifer Oestreich-Frost, Cassie Davenport, Nick Urban, Darin Gray, Logan Willits, and Rob Johnson.  Everyone had a lot of the same sites/apps such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, but the way they are categorized and organized varied.  My organization was similar to what Cassie, Jennifer, Logan and Rob did in that we all had things grouped fairly similarly and even shared some of the same groupings.  Nick’s and Darin’s were the most unique, both in how things were grouped and the design they used, especially Darin’s.  I really liked Darin’s idea of looking at his PLE as a gateway and depicting himself on a journey between the old world of traditional learning and the new world of social interactive learning, very clever!  Overall, comparing my PLE to my classmates has reinforced to me that my online presence and participation is not nearly as strong as it could be.  I kind of already knew that because I barely use Facebook, never had Twitter or Instagram or any of the really common things, much less the other types of social media.  Having seen their PLEs makes me all the more interested in growing and developing my own!

Online Communities

This week’s assignment was to join at least four new online communities. The ones I have chosen are two EdWeb communities (Champion Creativity and Adaptive Math Learning), three Google+ communities (Mathematics Education K-12, Technology in Education, and Educators on Google+), LinkedIn, and Delicious.  From the limited time I’ve had so far to try each one of these communities Google+ is my favorite by far!  I also had no idea that LinkedIn offered groups to join, I always thought it was just a place to post your professional profile and connect with other professionals.

I posted 3 new links on Delicious, commented in the EdWeb communities, shared links or posted comments in the Google+ groups, and posted comments to the LinkedIn groups.  Definitely outside my comfort zone to be a participant rather than a “lurker”, but this course is really helping me get out there and get connected!

Twitter Chats and Webinars

Part of the assignments for the past couple weeks has been to participate in Twitter Chats and Webinars.  This assignment was particularly challenging for me because my 2-month old daughter wants my attention all day and doesn’t care if I’m trying to attend a webinar or participate in a chat 🙂  Despite real life getting in the way, I was able to complete the assignment and I learned some interesting and valuable things.  Below are descriptions of the sessions I attended and screen shots of some of the ways I contributed.

Twitter Chat #1 Sunday at 9EST, #blogchat

It took me a couple tries to find a chat that was actually happening. I wanted to participate in #probchat, but nobody was saying anything, so I tried #ccsschat and same thing there. I tried #blogchat and that was the complete opposite! incredibly active. It was a challenging first chat to try to participate in because I could barely read the tweets they were coming in so fast. The topic was on personalities and how it affects your blog. Very interesting, but would have been better if I could keep up!

Twitter Chat #2 Tuesday at 12pm EST, #edchat

This twitter chat was about authentic learning and how it fits into a 21^st Century school system. This chat was just as fast paced as the first one I attended, but I felt a little more comfortable with it. Having never used twitter before this course I’m learning how it works as I go, but I’m still so slow. I felt like anytime I saw something I wanted to respond to or retweet it took me so long to do it that there were so many other tweets that came in that mine was irrelevant. I’m sure it’ll be easier each time, practice makes perfect!

Twitter Chat #3 (4, and 5), #teacherfriends

I started out trying to participate in #mdedchat, but nobody was participating. So then I tried #STEMchat, and same thing there, during the next hour I decided to try #teacherfriends and this chat was incredibly busy! The topic was writing and there were lots of teachers sharing strategies and resources for writing. The tweets were coming in so fast I couldn’t read them all, but I didn’t see much as far as writing in the math classroom, but there were lots of great strategies I could try to adapt.

Twitter Chat #4 Wednesday 1pm EST #ipadchat

At first it looked like this chat was going to be another dud like a few I’ve tried to participate in, but there were several people interested in participating (including some from our class!) so we had an impromptu chat. Someone asked about formative assessment apps and the chat took off from there. Lots of people sharing apps and ideas, it was very useful! I don’t have much experience using ipads in the classroom, right now I only have one, but within the next few years my school district is implementing a 1:1 ipad program so I definitely need to learn. I’ll keep #ipadchat in mind in the future to learn from other people and hear suggestions/tools for using ipads in the classroom.

The four webinars that I chose to participate in are listed below.

The first Webinar I attended was through edWeb.net on Adaptive Math Learning, called Using Data to Support Teaching and Learning in a Blended Learning Math Program. The three presenters were all from an elementary school. They discussed Dreambox and MobyMax, but focused mostly on Dreambox. This program allows students to work at their own pace and ability and based on performance Dreambox generates appropriate questions/content. The teacher has access to real-time data to use for flexible grouping, which the program will do for you. The presenters discussed the process they went through to implement this blended learning approach as well. This was my first webinar so it was interesting to see how a webinar worked. It was also interesting to participate by asking a few questions in the live chat. I also saw my PLN group member Darin Gray asking questions, which was pretty cool!

The second webinar I attended was called Contemporary Technology for the Autism Classroom. While I am not a special education teacher, almost every year I have had at least one student on the Autism spectrum in one of my classes, so I thought this might be beneficial. They discussed SMARTBoards (the projection system) with the Smart notebook software, SmartResponse system and SmartDocument reader, Gazepoint GP3 Eye Tracker, and software including TeachTown, Zac Browser, Boardmaker, Vizzle, video editing software (iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas 13), and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices such as Dynavox, tablets, many apps, and finished with emerging technologies (wearables).

The 3^rd webinar I attended was on Strategies and Tips for Getting Started with Digital Storytelling. This webinar provided some tools, ideas and techniques for using digital storytelling with students. The presenter discussed giving students a picture and a sentence to go along with it, then changing the sentence to see how the story changes, “Storytelling Speed Bump” (new character, change setting, etc.), giving them a sentence that has to be in the story somewhere. This webinar was not very helpful to me professionally because as a high school math teacher we don’t write stories or have time to do things like this, and most of the ideas seemed geared more toward elementary grades. I also preferred the format of the other webinars I attended more as they did not require a paid subscription to obtain a certificate of completion.

The 4^th webinar I attended was called Minds and Hearts Together – Essential Tools for Learning: Nurturing social-emotional learning in the early years. Even though I am a high school teacher I thought this might be a beneficial webinar because my school has recently started to emphasize relationship driven classrooms and making sure we are meeting students social-emotional needs. Also, as a new mom Iam interested on a personal level. The presenter discussed how to connect mind and heart in education. “Brains are built, not born”. She discussed SEL and the five domains of heart-mind well-being from www.heartmind.org as well as the importance of circle time. She also talked about the 7 C’s.

Digital Footprint

As a teacher I constantly hear my students talk about what they’re doing on social media. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and anything and everything else, they are constantly posting, tweeting, uploading content about themselves and their friends. I grew up at the time when computers and cell phones were gaining popularity, but until college I never had much access to it. I grew up on a farm, we had dial-up Internet, no cable/satellite, and no cell phone. I never had the chance to document my whole life and share it with everyone, and I’m glad for that. I was a good kid and never got into trouble, but I can imagine I might not be thrilled with some of the things that could have been online if I was growing up today.

When I Google myself, both my maiden and married names, almost nothing comes up. There was a Whitepages listing, the faculty page for my school, a few old newspapers articles from the local paper for things like graduation, and my wordpress blog and LinkedIn profile I had to make for a previous class. Definitely nothing I mind being out there for everyone to see, and I’m glad about that. It took some time and trying several different things with my name, like my old high school, the high school where I teach, my hometown, etc., and I had to go through several pages before finding them, none were on the first page of the Google search. I know having an online presence can be a good thing nowadays, but I’m ok with there not being much about me online, and I’m definitely glad that there is nothing out there (at least that I’m aware of) that I regret.

I like that I have basically a blank slate to create the digital footprint that I want, and being nearly 30 I have the maturity to make sure it will benefit and not hinder me. For my students now, and my daughter in the future, I’m nervous for them. They don’t necessarily have the maturity and foresight to see how the things they’re doing and sharing today will affect them in the future. Even before my daughter was born my husband and I have already had several conversations about how to try and protect her when it comes to this type of thing. Who knows what type of technology or what the “new thing” will be when she’s old enough to start doing things that could impact her future, but hopefully we will be able to teach her to be smart about what she says and does online.

Twtter

The five new hashtags that I chose to follow this week are: #education, #teaching, #edtech, #mathchat, and #STEM. I’m really excited about seeing what comes across #mathchat especially. From what I’ve seen so far it looks like it’s people posting articles, pictures, problems, and a score of other things all related to math. The #education looks to be a very broad collection of anything education related. In watching the tweets just this morning I’ve seen things ranging from education related journal articles, political tweets regarding education, job postings, quotes about education and all kids of other things. Lots of great things, but if you’re interested in something specific in the education field you would definitely want to consider using a different hashtag to narrow down the tweets. The #teaching a lot like the #education, but for teaching. There are job posts, articles, advice for new teachers, requests for syllabi, and so much more. The #edtech has many of the same types of things the #education has, but the tweets are narrowed down to mostly things related to the field of educational technology. Finally, the #STEM contains things related to science, technology, engineering, and math, but not necessarily all in an educational sense.

I’ve seen lots of interesting tweets so far from #mathchat, but there were a few that stuck out to me. Being a high school math teacher I have either Algebra 1 or Algebra 2, and Geometry in my schedule almost every year. This morning I noticed a little blog post about visual patterns and find the sum of squares and sum of cubes formulas for multiplying polynomials. It wasn’t anything fancy, but I liked the visual (basically using colored algebra tiles) to show how the pattern works. I teach this concept pretty much every year and we often use algebra tiles when working with multiplying polynomials so this a good visual to use for the formulas. Another resource I found was a geometry problem I may use the next time I teach an Honors Geometry course. The problem was to find the difference between the areas of the circumcircle and the incircle of an n-sided regular polygon. In the past we’ve always constructed the circumcircle and incircle, and worked with lots of properties of regular polygons, but never really combined the two topics. The problem might be a bit too advanced for a non-honors class as far as the algebra required to solve it goes, but it would be a great extra credit problem or just challenge problem. The last resource I want to mention has nothing to do with being a math teacher, but being a mom to a now two-month old baby girl I was very interested. It’s a list of activities to support math development from ages 0-36 months, and there are some great activities and ideas that I will definitely keep in mind to use with my daughter as she gets older.

In #teaching there are lots of great resources and ideas that I found particularly interesting and relevant to me. First of all one of the resources I hadn’t expected to find was the number of job postings for teachers! Companies and school districts are tweeting available listings for all kinds of teaching or teaching related jobs. Another interesting tweet I saw was a journal article about the decline of millennials in the teaching profession. This decline is causing major teacher shortages across the country as fewer college students are enrolled in teacher preparation programs and there has been an increase in the number of people who are teaching 3 to 4 years then leaving the education profession. The article also talked about college students’ view of education as a major as well as the lack of high-achieving individuals interested in pursuing education as a major. Another resources I found was an article with 10 tips for new teachers. Even though I’ll be starting my 8^th year teaching in the fall, it was an interesting read and I wish I had known some of the things mentioned when I first started teaching. If I ever have a student teacher this is definitely something I would share with them.

As a high school math teacher I’m always looking for ways to integrate curriculums to give my students a more holistic and relevant view of math, and from what I’ve seen the #STEM might help me with this. One tweet I found was a link to an article about Microsoft encouraging the use of the game Minecraft as a resources to help teach STEM subjects. I don’t know anything about Minecraft personally, but throughout the last few years I have definitely heard students talk about and seen students play it so it seems like something students might find interesting. Another good resource I found was a tweet of an article from Education Week’s blog titled “What is This Thing Called STEM?”. The article discusses what STEM is, as well as talks about some of the challenges school districts face in integrating and implementing STEM. The third resource I found from this hashtag was a YouTube video of a TEDx talk at Georgia State University about how the future of STEM depends on diversity. The speaker discusses how the majority of people working in STEM fields are white males, and she makes the case that STEM needs more diversity (people of color, women, people with disabilities, etc). This was a very interesting a thought provoking talk and is something I would definitely consider showing my math classes.

From #education and #edtech I saw a lot of similar types of tweets. With #education the three interesting resources I saw were job listings, articles on humanitarian aid for education, and an article on laptop/tablet safety in the classroom. In #edtech there was an article on how to use social media for interactive exit slips, an article on ideas for using Smartboards, and a blog post on top education apps teachers love.

Overall, in the short amount of time that I’ve been using Twitter I’ve already started seeing it’s value to me as an educator. I haven’t seen many applications for using Twitter in my classroom yet, but as far as just-in-time professional development for myself. I would definitely need to find the appropriate hashtags for the particular topic I’m looking for, but since Twitter provides immediate constantly updating information and resources it seems like an excellent way to learn professionally. The only issue I really see so far is that there may be too much to sort through to find the relevant and worthwhile resources sometimes. For example, I could almost constantly scroll through the new tweets that popped up under #education and I could never hope to look through all of them. It would be easy to miss something great or spend too much looking through things trying to find what I’m looking for. All things considered I’m excited about continuing to use Twitter to help me grow professionally!

Communities of Practice, PLN, Connectivism

The assignment this week was to create a nonlinguistic representation of the major concepts discussed.  I decided to create a Glog to illustrate my understanding of Communities of Practice, Personal Learning Networks, and Connectivism.  My Glog was created using Glogster.  The images I chose depict the basics of the three major topics.  The background image is a group of individuals all connected in a network.  The tools connecting them are the social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.  Just as the individuals are linked together, they also form a group, and to me that represents the Communities of Practice.  There are several images of groups to depict that a person may be part of multiple Communities of Practice, but together these are part of an individual’s Personal Learning Network.

Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. Retrieved July 3, 2015 from www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

Smith, M. K. (2003, 2009). Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice, the encyclopedia of informal education.  Retrieved July 3, 2015 from www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm.

Wagner, M. (2012, January 31). Personal learning networks for educators: 10 tips. Retrieved July 3, 2015, from http://gettingsmart.com/2012/01/personal-learning-networks-for-educators-10-tips/

EDTECH 543

As part of EdTech 543 we have been required to create a Facebook page, Twitter account, and a Diigo account. I already had a personal Facebook so I’m familiar with that, and I have a Diigo account from a previous EdTech course, but I have never used Twitter before. I see the value in creating and using these accounts; however, since they are all tied to my Boise State email I’m not sure how useful they will be after I complete the EdTech program. I know it’s not a difficult thing to set up accounts with these social media outlets, but I feel like by the time I will have created all the accounts on all the different sites required by the various EdTech courses that I will have so many I won’t be able to remember them all.

As far as my experience professionally with social media, I have very little. My school has been through MyBigCampus and is now using GoogleSites, but it seems like every couple years they chose a new thing and anything created previously is discarded. Beyond my graduate courses in the EdTech program I have not really used social media in my professional development other than an occasional professional development session that mentions social media. Really the only thing I’ve used that might be considered social media is Remind 101, an app that allows me to send out group texts (from a generic number not my own) to remind parents and students about important assignments and tests.

Since my knowledge and use of social media is fairly limited I hope to learn a lot from this course. I would really like to see how to utilize social media in a high school classroom and specifically in a high school math classroom. There are so many things I’ve seen that seem like they would be perfect for an English or social studies class, but the practical applications in a math class seem limited. It seems like formatting math symbols is something that not a lot of programs/apps/tools can do, or if they can it is time consuming to do so.