Social Media for Educators with Mr DK

Yesterday I went along to the ‘Social Media  for Educators’ Core Education Breakfast and Master Class with DK  and it was full of ideas about reconsidering how and why we might use ICTs in and beyond the classroom. 

One example was the website SoundCloud which is primarily used for musicians and DJs for recording, uploading and sharing music. Basically it’s an audio version of YouTube, but you can comment and annotate tracks online – anyhoo we got talking about other ways we could use it and it struck me that this could be a really powerful English teaching platform where you could get students recording readings of texts, poems and then annotate and identify/comment on language techniques or practice and feedback on delivery of speech???

AudioBoo was another, it is a website and available as apps too. It is a free voice recorder that can then be embedded or emailed as an audio file – again, the ways students and teachers could use this is endless and the fact that students could have it on their smartphone or access it online so easily meant it could be anywhere. Imagine doing locational writing but instead you recorded an oral description as a starter.

Also when you start combining platforms/software it becomes even more interesting – creating a blog with embedded slide shows created on Animoto with oral text embedded from AudioBoo and annotated oral texts thanks to SoundCloud.

I guess for me it is exciting because it gives us a chance to do justice to the three strands of the English curriculum – the oral, visual and written, in a way we couldn’t do so easily in the past…and then we can mash them up in any number of combinations.

I also wanted to share the Booktrack app (which provides a soundscape to go along worth your digital text) – could be a great way to engage reluctant readers. I would also love to see students have a go at creating their own!

And finally this clip which looks at the power of blogging as a metacognitive process. Blogging is definitely one example of an ICT platform that has a huge range of uses and opportunities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=livzJTIWlmY

All of this is thanks to DK – someone well worth looking up online.
DK on Twitter 

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