Social Media In Education From Edutopia

This guest blog article from Edutopia has some great points to make about the role of educators in teaching students about the responsible uses of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The guest blogger, Steve Johnson, made several key points.

1. It is quickly becoming our duty as educators in the 21st century to guide our students towards responsible use of social media.
2. Social Media use is becoming our new first impression.
3. Connected, community based learning is important. By blocking social media use, we are depriving our students of a huge opportunity to allow them to learn in connected ways.
4. In five years, the filters will be gone whether you like it or not.

Check out the fullpost at Edutopia.

Edutopia Project Based Learning Info

I know that several of my followers from Pewaukee will be piloting a project-based learning model next year at the middle school. Thought you might be interested in this post.

http://www.edutopia.org/maine-project-learning-free-resources-and-tools

More from Issuu

I have spent the week sifting through Issuu. It is like this giant library of publications from professionals and just ordinary people. You can browse by subject and bookmark some favorites to use in your own library. Here is one on Color Theory from Eye Magazine, which has always been one of my favorite design magazines.

Open publication - Free publishing - More supplement

The information contained in the publication is great and the design of the images and text is beautiful. For art students this is a great intro to color theory that goes beyond just the color wheel. You have to check out Issuu. Next week I hope to develop my own publication using some of my photos. It should be interesting.

Issuu: Wow What a Cool Tool

I have been messing around on the web lately now that school is over.  I was on the Art Ed 2.0 ning that I am a member of and was reading Matt Cauthron's posts.  He is just one of the talented teachers who inspires me on the ning network.  Matt had a link to a site I'd not been to or heard of before.  It is called Issuu and is a place to publish your documents and a place to share documents.  Now you might say well that sounds like Google docs, but this is nothing like Google docs.  You could say well drop.io let's you share docs and publish them, but this is different.  Here is the short video that explains the possiblities. 

I am especially impressed with the high quality design of the publications. There are so many possibilities for using this. As an art teacher this could be the free option I've been searching for, for students to create digital portfolios. I will explore further and keep you posted. Check it out yourself and let me know what you think.