EDCI 5825 Blogpost #4

I think all teachers should be encouraged to create online activities of some sort. As we have discussed in many of our classes and as November (2010) points out, students learn in different ways. Some of our students will do very well in the traditional classroom, others will struggle, and many will fall in between those two extremes. November (2010) gave many reasons as to why online learning is a good idea, but the main reason behind it all is that it is another way tool teachers can use to reach more students.

Social networking is becoming more entwined in our everyday lives. This phenomenon is growing at such a fast rate that schools and educators cannot afford to ignore it. In our study of George Siemens and his theory of connectivism in our Learning Theories class, the idea of people being connected through online social networks seems central to his ideas. Siemens suggests that knowledge is going to be something that is stored as a society and less on an individual level and that the individual is going to need to learn the skills to access it. That is where social networks come into play. With networks such as Twitter and Facebook, students will be able to tap into the knowledge of their network community to learn the answer to a problem that they don’t understand. As technology advances, students are going to become increasingly “wired” into these online communities 24/7. I agree with Richardson (2010) that as teachers it is our responsibility to educate ourselves about these networks so that we can utilize them inside and outside our classrooms and to educate our students how to use them responsibly.