The Social Web Chaper 6

Twitter and social bookmarking affects education because they are slowly creating a shift from individual learning towards collaborative learning.  They both encourage socialization with others and, in fact, won’t be effective unless there is communication between other people.  Teachers are going to have to reconsider how much they stress individual work and homework assignments in the classroom because it may be that in the future, our students will only be communicating in their careers and never have to complete projects alone.  Twitter is one tool that I could foresee students taking advantage of when trying to find information or answer questions.  They will simply pose a question on the site and from there read any responses they may get.   I also really liked the idea of keeping in contact with distant family members over twitter.  To relate this to a school setting, I feel that it could be useful in staying up-to-date with other teachers.  Whenever I have a question about a behavior problem or need an idea for a creative lesson I could always twitter with other educators.  As we have already learned about in class, social bookmarking is a very useful tool for multiple reasons.  One of the biggest advantages is that it is an easy way to keep track of numerous sites for references.  This will come in handy as a teacher when I want to find ideas for lessons plans or other information and all I have to do is go to my delicious account.  It is also a great way to share information.  If I can’t find any sites about a particular topic, I can look at other people’s accounts and learn from them.  Lastly, social bookmarking would be very useful in organizing information and all the various websites I like.  The tags allow me to quickly click on a topic I am looking for information on.

                As a future teacher, I’m not sure how relevant this information will be for younger age children.  However, if we show them the general concepts of how it works, they will be able to use it more effectively in the future.  This information will especially be useful in high school and college when students are learning more about their careers and can connect with people of the same interest.  It would never harm someone to communicate with others online and teach them about safety.  I feel that as an educator, I will for sure use these tools.  It will make life so much easy when I can just go to one site to find information and find other sites that other teachers recommend.  It will save lots of time relooking everything up and finding information in general.  This will allow me to concentrate on more important issues occurring.