Journal #7 PLN Reflection

I joined the Classroom 2.0 affinity group and surprisingly it isn't completely dead like most of the other affinity groups I was poking around on throughout the course. I received at least one email per  week that listed free conference sessions, updates to events, or research opportunities. They had a free informative session for "connected librarians" last week, which one could attend through the connectedlibrarians.com website. It seems like every day they have some kind of presentation or event that correlates to technology in the classroom, in October they had presentations with titles ranging from "Connection to Collaboration", "Connected Leadership", and "21st Century Classroom Management". The website itself has an extremely useful section on the left called "Finding Interesting Discussions" which breaks down forum threads by category, making it easily to search for discussions relevant to what you are looking for. I highly recommend this affinity group, it was extremely useful for me and I can see myself using this resource in the future.

In terms of the Digg Reader, I found it pretty useful for keeping news stories organized by source. This can be a useful tool for students and teachers to individually organize all their web sources for a project, presentation or research. Digg has it's drawbacks in terms of collaboration however, which is why I prefer Reddit as a social network for content, whether it be news, jokes, videos or pictures, the community and the commenting ability makes it a superior social news site in comparison to Digg. I have mentioned Reddit before, and I think it could be a powerful tool for the classroom and is totally free. A class could have it's own subreddit that the teacher could moderate (add/remove users, content, etc) and the entire class could submit and comment on each others posts.

Twitter is an interesting case as I mentioned in a previous blog post. I didn't find it useful during this class or for anything really. I only find it useful for its ability to collect information like social trends and to see the daily 'hive mind' thoughts of humanity. As I said before, I normally use Twitter as an openly public user to proclaim my frustration or approval of political or worldly events. I don't use it to communicate with any friends or family, but I do find that companies, celebrities and other personalities tend to use Twitter for everything and can be the only reliable way of communication with them if you don't know them. For example, Formula 1 on the BBC and SKY both have twitter accounts specifically to ask questions directly to the commentators or personalities. It introduces a fun way for companies and entertainers to interact with their audience. I really think Twitter is an excellent social media outlet, though I do not think it is a good tool for direct student-teacher interaction. Email is and will be the main point of contact for most people in the professional world for a long time to come, so I'd rather focus on some sort of email communication between student and teacher to build that essential skill.