Will Richardson has a good list of links that might come in useful if you’re trying to explain what social computing might offer to teachers. [Thanks to Ewan McIntosh for the link]
It’s no bad thing to try to explain it to teachers first, and let them use these tools as they will in classroom settings. A different way, which might be easier, is to reverse that. By doing so, the teachers and staff can learn from the ways the children use the technology.
Till recently I was working at a primary in Kew called The Unicorn. (It’s a great school! š ).
As a side project, I set up a blog for them called Code Unicorn. It was intended to be a blog written by them, with as little as possible involvement from me. This opt-out wasn’t laziness, but instead an effort to encourage them to write about things they were interested in (rather than stuff my thirty-something brain thought would be fun). I didn’t announce it publicly, just said it’s up to the interested parties to spread the word.
It took a little hand-holding – albeit a lot less than I’d expected – and by the end of last term there were some regular contributors, and a switched-on boy called Max had done a little ‘viral’ marketing campaign round the school. He printed out some stickers and stuck them on friends jumpers, asking them to pass them on to a friend.
Anyway, teachers and parents started paying attention, and started commenting.
By watching how the children were using it day to day, it was much easier for staff to translate research and factoids about social computing to ideas for integrating it into the classroom. Ali Lim, the art teacher, has begun to use Flickr as another way of displaying the children’s work. And the big result was one of Roberta Linehan’s comments.
“I think this is a great site! Can teachers have one too?”
Roberta happens to be the head teacher.