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Networked Knowledge Activities and Digital Teaching

I took last week off for a much needed mental break and while I took the week off from blogging and posting, I did not turn my brain off. I have been thinking a lot over the last two weeks about this course. I  have learned so much and gained many new tools and resources. One of the readings this week discussed how math teachers use Pinterest to acquire resources for their lessons and teachers' use of social media for professional development. This has been something I have thought about frequently since our community assignment-how I am able to use various social media tools to continue my professional development, build a community, and learn from my fellow colleagues. This has been wonderful especially now being physically distant from my coworkers and fellow teachers. 

However, last week and this week we have started discussing actually designing networked knowledge activities and using these tools in the K-12 classroom environment. This has been a little bit more tricky for me. It is easy for me to embrace the use of social media and learning but it is harder to think about implementing these things for my students but as August approaches it seems more and more likely that I will be teaching at least partially online. 

I have decided there are several things that I would like to try for the next school year to make things easier and more engaging for my students and myself. I really loved Symbaloo (one of the tools from last week) and their blog has some great ideas on how I can use this tool next year. I am looking forward to this! I have also decided that I am going to ask my sociology students to blog once a week- a reflection on the current events in society. I think this will be a great way for them to process their thoughts and emotions during this tough time, practice writing skills, and also generate some discussion between my students about how we are all processing and coping right now. I need to take some time to work out the details of this, and some of that is waiting on the school to finalize their reopening plans, but this class has given me a lot of confidence in improving my teaching (in-person and online) and integrating some awesome new social media tools that my high school students will enjoy, at least I hope. 

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