Brainstorming

There are so many things associated with Web 2.0 that I am having a hard time trying to figure out what I think we should do for our research. I really like the current discussion on the use of Wikipedia in class, especially because people seem to be passionate about using it or not using it. It would be neat to see if there is any research on the topic.

A teacher in my school starting using this website that acts like facebook for teachers and students. Its obviously much more secure and completely written for educationaly purposes, but it has the same interface as facebook and the kids really seem to be into it. Its called "edmodo". I'm not sure if there is any research going on about using social media or simulated social media to teach kids. But it might be another topic.

IDK what is on your mind? What direction do you think you want to take this in? I'm completely open.

- John

I am glad you suggested social media because I really enjoy reading about that topic. When you brought up edmodo, I thought about this new website that our district is going to slowly try to incorporate with teachers and students called My Big Campus, similar to sites like Facebook where students can engage in discussions, post work/videos, etc. So I have a feeling that this could work out well for us.

Maybe you can work on portions of the paper talking a little bit about edmodo and I can talk about MBC and we can compare the two and then make a commentary about the use of social media in education, or more specifically, secondary ed since that what we are. I also have read some interesting articles in the past about using social media in the classroom so hopefully if I can dig those up, we might already have some articles to work with, if they aren't too old.

I don't know how much research we will actually find on the specific sites, but I know we'll find a lot on social media in education. So how does that sound...I think it could be a great topic to work with. Thanks for your input above!!

- Megan

Decided to just focus on Edmodo for the paper because we had plenty to talk about with our commentary on social networking in general. I thought we gave good overviews and examples in the paper overall. - Megan