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

Web 2.0 Products and Performances!

New TaskBuilderOnline Templates! One of the challenges teachers face is how to select student work and exit performances for instructional units and daily lessons that reflect the intent and substance of content standards -- especially if the goal is to integrate the content standard into technology.

Web 2.0 tools offer a way to address this challenge and engage students in timely and relevant approaches for learning any content standard. As part of the lesson and assessment development process in LearningFront, teachers use the TaskBuilderOnline tool to access examples of written, oral, graphic, psychomotor, and, now, Web 2.0 products and performances. This means they can align Web 2.0 tool products and performances with the content standards, real world setting, activities, scoring tools, and results of their lessons or assessments.

When Web 2.0 tools are used to produce a student product or performance related to a content standard, teachers get closer to answering the question: How did technology help my students to increase their knowledge and skills on classroom work and external tests used for improvement and accountability purposes.

Please check out the Web 2.0 products and performances in the LearningFront PD tool, TaskBuiderOnline, and let us know what you think or how they might be improved.

Nick Hobar
President, LearningFront

21st Century Community Learning Centers!

New Resources Coming! Many schools and communities throughout the United States have been awarded 21st Century Community Learning Center Grants for afterschool, Saturday, and summer programs. The latest round of funding has a strong emphasis for aligning state content standards and assessments with rigorous and student-centered learning activities that occur in the centers.

LearningFront is partnering with the Steelton-Highspire School District in PA to start-up the District’s new 21st Century Community Learning Center. This will include new instructional resources in the LearningFront PD tools: TaskBuilderOnline and eLearningTeacher. This means the center instructional facilitators will help to design and field-test new teaching templates in TaskBuilderOnline and new professional development programs in eLearningTeacher. Moreover, they will be able to use LearningFront social media tools to communicate and share resources with the center director, their peers, District classroom teachers, and other facilitators in learning centers throughout the nation. And, any LearningFront member can access these resources and may collaborate with the Center Director and facilitators as a colleague or team member.

This is an exciting opportunity to apply the LearningFront global community to shape the Center’s vision, share ideas, solve problems, and collaborate outside the typical K-12 environment.

We invite you to collaborate with us through LearningFront.

Nick Hobar
President, LearningFront

Data-Driven Lesson Planning!

Professional Development Workshop! Yesterday my colleague, Melanie Hood-Wilson, and I worked with a group of middle school teachers from Union Avenue Middle School in Irvington, NJ on data-driven lesson planning. 

First, the teachers joined the LearningFront online community and learned its social media tools for collaborating within their school and around the world. Second, all participating teachers used the professional development tool, TaskBuilderOnline, to plan and develop a data-driven lesson plan based on NJ content standards, data about their students’ performances, and proven practices and data analysis templates available in TaskBuilderOnline. As part of this process, the teachers accessed WikiTasks of other data-driven lessons developed by LearningFront members from other schools. Since the social media tools are integrated with TaskBuilderOnline, the teachers used them to share their draft lessons with workshop peers and provide feedback to each other about their lessons during the workshop.

When I started this workshop, I asked the teachers: “How many of you have a Facebook account? A Twitter account?” Not one teacher raised a hand! At the end of this workshop, they had learned all of the skills needed for any social media application and for developing a data-driven lesson plan for their classrooms that could be shared and updated through social media and online professional tools -- now that’s the power of combining people, teaching, and technology to improve learning!

Nick Hobar
President, LearningFront

2009 Powering Up with Technology Conference

Dear LearningFront Colleagues:

Welcome to my session on “Advancing the Frontier of Learning through Online Communities!”

Description: Online learning communities help anyone who joins to access the collective intelligence of other dedicated educators. Never before have individuals had the power to connect through networks of peers to access, produce, and share standards, lessons, tests, data displays, graphic organizers, messages, training sessions, and other learning resources on demand.

Feedback: Please leave a comment about your involvement in this conference session.

Thank you.

Nick Hobar

Authentic Learning Projects!

Dear LearningFront Colleagues:

Networking on LinkedIn! Recently, I had the pleasure of connecting with Eric Sheninger on LinkedIn because of our mutual interests related to integrating technology and instruction. Eric is the principal of New Milford High School in New Jersey. After he explored and got comfortable with TaskBuilderOnline -- he is a very fast learner, he posted two of his teachers’ authentic learning projects as WikiTasks in LearningFront -- for economics and biology. I think they are quality examples of rigorous and relevant instructional experiences for today’s students. Please check them out in the WikiTask tool by searching on keywords: economics and biology.

I encourage you to invite visionary, dynamic, and productive leaders like Eric that you know to join the LearningFront online community.

Nick Hobar
President, LearningFront

Roller Clap!

Dear LearningFront Colleagues:

Steel-High Rollers -- Roller Clap! I completed three more days supporting teachers to develop data-driven lessons at Steelton-Highspire high school. It was another terrific experience to observe and engage with the teachers' in-depth thinking about students and teaching practices! And I like the way they are catching on to WikiTasks. It will be interesting to see how these teachers improve their lesson plan templates for next year as they think about the progress that’s been achieved this year. Roller Clap!!!

Nick Hobar
President, LearningFront