Integrating Learning Into Social Media

Dear LearningFront Colleagues:

Wow! Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, LearningFront, and on and on! Educators are excited and engaged in the social media world and loving it. And what question do you think has surfaced? You’re right: How do we integrate social media into education, into curriculum, into teaching, into assessment. 

Hold on! I think we need to remix the question. For example, how do we integrate learning, teaching, and assessment into Twitter, into YouTube, and so forth. We’ve been integrating new processes into education for decades. And what happens? Typically, the same structure, the same teacher-pupil ratios, and the same blocks of time prevail with their usual cast of obstacles. I believe combining learning and social media causes excitement, fun, and new and potentially better ways of teaching and learning.

At LearningFront, we’re exploring ways to design classroom lessons that remix learning, teaching, and social media -- we’re calling them Learning Layouts. We invite you to co-create and share them with the LearningFront online community.

As I said in a recent tweet: “What I like is how Twitter updates PD topics, delivers learning links, and pushes the buzz -- with fun and in real time! I’m not sure I could say that about an after school workshop. Exciting stuff is happening!

What do you see on the frontier of learning?

Nick Hobar

President, LearningFront