Katie McKnight Podcast Series

Hi this is Katie McKnight for K-12 Teachers Alliance and we're going to talk a little bit about using social networking in classrooms for teaching and learning. So there's little doubt about the importance of technology in the teaching of subject areas and to develop literacy skills for the 21st century. So things like blogs, wikis and other electronic media have placed even greater demands on our students to become more effective in communicating their ideas and assertions in written form. So for example, if you use Facebook (like most people I know who are my age), the whole trick with that is writing a status that everyone can communicate or respond to. And the more people that comment on your status, the more successful you know that you were in communicating what you were thinking or feeling at the time. Our kids know that too. They use Web 2.0 tools all the time like Twitter and Facebook and now even something like Google+ (which I personally am just starting to learn myself).