sandra's mm
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TRANSCRIPT
My One Best Moment
Sandra McCarthy
My One Best Moment
• My best ICT moment revolves around
introducing my students to social media.
• I wanted my students to have a safe and
secure environment in which to learn
about communicating with others online.
Web 2.0 resources• My first step in introducing students to social media was
via TodaysMeet.com. These rooms are free of charge and
can be created by anyone. In relation to privacy, access to
these rooms is limited to those who have the IP address,
www.todaysmeet.com/???? for the room you create.
• When a room is created it remains open for a designated
time, you can choose anywhere between a couple of
hours and one year. I generally chosen to have my rooms
open for one week at a time.
TodaysMeet
• I used TodaysMeet to introduce social
media and began using it for classroom
activities such as recording take home
reading books. and for students to
respond individually to general
classroom discussion questions.
• This has allowed me to track what
books students have out each day.
• It has enabled individuals to have
thinking time and be able to answer
questions individually without having
the answer called out.
www.todaysmeet.com
• The bonus of introducing TodaysMeet.com to my
students was that they began communicating with each
other outside of the classroom. Students were saying
hello to each other, telling friends what they had for
dinner. One of the Mums even wished all the mothers a
Happy Mother’s Day via our room.
• My students were engaged with TodaysMeet.com. They
chatted to each other over the weekends and requested
that I have a room open for them to communicate with
each other during the school holidays.
• Todaysmeet.com has been an
interesting platform that has enabled
conversations to develop around
their responsibilities and use of
appropriate language while
communicating with other people
electronically.
Challenges Faced• As with many things a negative has
arisen from this positive
environment.
• Recently I had students who chose to
log in under other peoples names
and make inappropriate comments.
• While the students were spoken to
about this being inappropriate it
happened again and the comments
were causing discomfort for those
whose names were being used as the
logins.
User Friendly?
• Yes- todaysmeet.com is easy to use.
• It only asks you to enter your name,
click on join and then start posting
your comments.
Editable / Monitorable
• As a college we have found that it is not
easy to remove unwanted comments and it
is virtually impossible to trace who the
perpetrator was.
• Todaysmeet.com is an American site and
there is no facility for the room host to
delete posts.
• Any requests for removing posts and/or closing a
room early must be done by email to the creator
and deleting of posts and room closures are done at
their discretion.
• I did receive a reply to my request for information,
however due to time zone differences there was a
significant time delay.
• They were happy to close my room early after
supplying them details of the comments and the
room address.
My Reactions
• These incidents left me questioning
the use of social media in my
classroom.
• I decided that I would not generate
anymore todaysmeet.com rooms and
thus the search began, with the
assistance of our ICT department, for an
alternative that provided a higher level of
monitoring, identification and the ability
to monitor and manipulation of student
posts from within the classroom.
Outcome• During our ICT – SIT a new web 2.0
tool was discussed, Padlet -
http://padlet.com
• Padlet is a renamed, updated version
of wallwisher.
www.padlet.com
• After being shown around the
features and playing with making
posts on a wall created for the
meeting I decided to create my own
login and have set up a page / wall to
use with my students.
How we use Padlet• Student’s record their Take Home
Book titles.
• Student’s list their interests for
Investigations sessions (Walker
Learning Approach).
www.padlet.com/wall/1sandra
www.padlet.com/wall/investigations1s
The Journey continues…
• I am excited about this next step in
my journey and my students journey
in developing the skills and
responsibilities they will need to be
confident and safe web 2.0 users.