A fictional story based on true events: Mrs. Smith was hired as a principal in a school enrolling student in grades 5-8. She started a Facebook group for the school and encouraged parents to join in it. The principal’s time on the job was contentious and, in many cases, drama arising from the Facebook group Read More
Category: Social Media
Thoughts on a Tweet
Seriously teachers. Stop tweeting pictures of students. — Dr. Gary Ackerman (@GaryAckermanPhD) November 11, 2021 I recently had a tweet go “viral” in the non-celebrity sense… something like 80,000 impressions in a day which I attribute to the likes, replies, and retweets. In this post, I dig a little deeper into my rationale for the Read More
Getting on Twitter… A Quick Guide for Teachers
Twitter is a method of quickly publishing text, pictures, and video to the Internet. Many educators avoid using Twitter and other social media because of high-profile embarrassments that are reported on a regular basis. Those embarrassments are largely the result of the ease with which one can post information to the Internet. It takes only Read More
My Elevator Pitch on Twitter for Educators
Twitter is a method of quickly publishing text, pictures, and video to the Internet. Many educators avoid using Twitter and other social media because of high-profile embarrassments that are reported on a regular basis. Those embarrassments are largely the result of the ease with which one can post information to the Internet. It takes only Read More
Embrace Social Technologies
When computers arrived on the consumer market, they were tools for programming hobbyists. By the mid-1990’s consumer and educational computers came with Internet protocols and modems as standard parts. As massive numbers of users went online, the Internet was predicted to be “the infinite library.” While traditional publishers moved content online to begin creating this Read More
What Mark Deuze Wrote About Navigating a World Dominated by Digital Media
The dominant information technology has been print for so long that it has been natural for generations of students and teachers to conclude skills using text should be the focus of what we do in schools. Many of today’s educators were adolescents when print still dominated culture, but print is being replaced by digital electronic Read More
#edtech for #edleaders: The Changing Nature of the Web
At its most basic level, the World Wide Web is a collection of servers; these computers are always powered on and connected to the network. Files on a web server are contained in a directory that is configured to allow outside users to read the contents, and the file is read when a visitor uses Read More
Google+ Reflections
So, the word has come out that Google+ will be shutting down. I can’t say this is going to have any affect on my digital life. I have (had) a G+ account, but found little there that wasn’t other places and the community did little to help me (of course, I did little to help Read More
Review of Rewired
Between 2008 and 2011, I wrote several brief reviews of books which appeared on the Education Review web site. Since then, the editors ceased publication of that type of review and removed the previously published brief reviews from the site. I am making the original drafts of my reviews available here. Rosen, Larry. (2010). Rewired: Understanding the Read More
Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media
Education and the models and strategies educators use to create learning environments are grounded in ideas about how people learn. Ideas about learning are grounded in cognitive and learning sciences, and also on ideas about the organization and structure of knowledge. Connectionism is an idea that is gaining popularity and influence in thinking about teaching Read More