Educating Young Teachers in the Use of Social Tech in Education

Spent last evening with a group of young teachers in Baltimore.

This was the first of our ten sessions on social technology in education, and a few things struck me as noteworthy.

First of all was the professionalism of the group. It's not that I don't regularly encounter teachers who take their profession seriously, rather it's so long been a standard quip that young teachers are so inherently unprofessional that it was a nice fork-in-the-eye of hearsay to see that our young teachers -- at least the folks in my group -- are more than equipped with a good set of professional skills.

Second was that by-and-large, these young teachers are unaware of everything we've been talking about on this blog. That is, with the exception of two or three 'social' Twitterers, the only social technologies represented among the group were MySpace and Facebook. And almost everyone who admitted to using MySpace claimed that they had long since given the service up.

In a way, there seemed to be a bit of embarrassment surrounding the use of social networking. Many admitted that they'd not want their students peeking into their own FB profiles.

Ten weeks should change that attitude.

One of the goals of this course is to help the teachers build their PLNs, so it was exciting to see so many of them sign up for their first Twitter accounts. In fact, we got off to what I consider a good start beginning with a review of the shift in educational technology from the old hardware days to the Cloud and social media followed by a look into the work of folks like McLeod, Fisch, and Richardson.

Then it was on to the nitty gritty of building a digital profile: students created their own Weebly pages to be used as the hub of their social network (I've found this is a relatively easy way to organize if you are using several Web 2.0 services). Folks left the class with a web page, a Twitter account, Diigo, and instructions for starting a blog.

Certainly a different sort of thing than when I was in Ed School.

Next week, we'll take a look at Google Apps for education and Google Profiles as well as ways to activate one's PLN. And on that latter note, I have to give a big hearty shout-out to my own PLN across the Twitterverse: responding in a massive voice in my request for things young teachers should know about Twitter, you all gave the medium the chance to perfectly illustrate the message.

Thank you and I hope you all continue to be a part of this building process for these young teachers over the course of the next ten weeks.