Social Networking Experiences and Expectations

I found joining the social networks for this course to be very simple. As a millennial I use social networks daily so setting up a profile and making posts felt a fairly easy thing to do as an assignment for my class! I was not familiar with Diigo, and still cannot figure out how to pronounce it, but I feel that sharing websites that we as teachers find to be our favorite can be a very beneficial form of collaboration.

I can honestly say that I have not used social media at all for my own professional development. I am excited to learn some ways to do so though as I know that there are copious amounts of resources that can be implemented if I were to do some research. For example, I know that many teachers have blogs where they post their resources as well as many teachers post their lessons and notes online. These could be great things for me to do, but just finishing up my second year of teaching I haven’t reached out as much as I would like to enhance my lessons.

I have not used social media much at all as an instructional strategy in my learning environment. I teach freshmen in high school and know that they are very involved in their social media accounts. I feel it could be a very beneficial tool, but I also know that it has to be moderated and in some areas could be a bit taboo. The only thing I have used that could possibly be construed as social media is the use of Remind. Remind allows me to send out messages to my students that sign up that show up like text messages on their phones. They can respond to these text messages as well.

I don’t have too many expectations for this course. This is my first grad school class that I have taken so I feel l will develop many of my expectations of what grad school will be like from this course. Since that course has a title of social networking I expect that we will often use social networking accounts to interact. I also expect that we will learn ways to implement social networks into our teaching.