So, how can we communicate with those students? To communicate effectively you need to use the same tools as your students. I’ll discuss four of the most common starting with Facebook.

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com

I begin this discussion with Facebook because it will be the tool of choice of most of your students. Facebook is basically a contact page, but it also allows individuals to share blog entries, files, photos, maps, or nearly anything they like with their peers. Think of it as a loosely organized social group, in fact it is often referred to as a social network. The nice thing about this network is that we can choose who our friends are and can allow or deny individuals access.

Many of the more hip educators create Facebook sites where their students can communicate with them and keep up with what their favorite teacher is doing. Some keep a personal and “business” page to keep their friends and students separate. You’ll find many of your students have access to this tool on their phones, so it makes it very easy to contact you. I find it useful as well because I don’t have to answer the same questions over and over again.

Do keep in mind that your public “face” on Facebook is, well, public. If you are not a very personal kind of teacher this may not be for you.

Tweet, tweet!

Twitter
http://www.twitter.com

Okay, maybe this bird doesn’t tweet, but you can. Tweets are short messages you type on twitter to share your thoughts with others. Twitter was originally intended to share personal thoughts, but many businesses, news agencies, and even educators have found it a good way to keep others informed because other members can follow your tweets.

At first I didn’t think Twitter would be all that useful, but as I began using it to follow colleagues and provided information on what I was up to it began to make sense that this was a very effective way to communicate. One of my peers has his students post Hikus using Twitter then comment on each other’s poetry.  I’ll bet you can find even more creative ways to use tweets with your students.

WordPress
http://www.wordpress.com

Maybe you want to say a little more than you can in the 120 characters Twitter allows per post. In this case you can create your own blog like the one you are reading right now. Blogs are like a diary with an audience. You can write about pretty much anything and your students, and the general public, can read and comment on your entries. WordPress makes blogging as easy as typing a document like you would in a word processor and posting it when you feel it’s ready for public consumption.

I started blogging when I began traveling overseas with my job. I originally started writing to share my adventures in Slovakia with my family, but I found my students and other visitors enjoyed visiting and commenting as well. The intent of this blog is to share ideas with my colleagues and hopefully gain more ideas from them along the way. Give it a shot, I think you’ll find you have more to say than you may think.

PBWorks
http://www.pbworks.com

One problem with blogs is that others can only comment on what you have read, but what if you want them to contribute to the conversation? PBWorks provides free wikis to educators. For those who don’t know, a wiki is a free form site where users you invite to contribute can create documents, projects, or whatever on your wiki all working at the same time if they like. Out of this Chaos often comes some very impressive collaborative work. Wikipedia is a prime example of this; given space to try their hand at writing their own encyclopedia thousands of individuals have created a very useful and usually authoritative product pretty much at random.

I have used my wiki to provide status updates on projects, share ideas, collaborate on documents with people halfway across the country, and more.  Drop by PBWorks and create a wiki of your own. I’m sure between you and your students you can create a masterpiece. Once you do post a link to it in the comments here so we can all check it out.

I’ve provided you with but a few ways you can communicate effectively with your students, perhaps you can come up with more. Share your thoughts in my comments section.

• My organization doesn’t allow it because of privacy issues. They don’t want me talking about my students publicly.
• I don’t want people to know that much about me.
• It takes too much time.
• I don’t know how to do it.

I work for the US government and you won’t find many more restrictive organizations than that. I know you have seen or heard in the press that the military often cracks down on soldiers posting to blogs from the field because they don’t want them to jeapordize their units or their missions. If you teach in public schools your administration may very well have placed restrictions on what you can post. Most of the time, though, if you follow some basic guidelines even the most restrictive of organizations will allow blogs.

A concept you hear discussed often in the military is OPSEC, or operational security. OPSEC is a simple set of guidelines that discuss what you should and shouldn’t say publicly, how to represent yourself in public, and how not to become a target. OPSEC applied to blogs is a matter of never discussing locations, time frames, or directly naming participants if doing so could possibly endanger individuals or mission. The military looks at it as if there is someone spying on you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. 

So, what it boils down to really is exercising caution when posting to your blog. Protect the privacy of individuals and advise others who post comments to your blog to be wary as well. On occassion students may slip up and say too much, in which case it’s your responsibility to censor private information as necessary. In most cases you’ll find yourself discussing concepts or ideas on your blog, not so much about people anyway.

As for blogging taking too much time, I suppose this may be true for some, but for most of us blogging is really just an extension of thinking. Most of us have little discussions in our minds all day long and much of the time there is no one there to share these thoughts with. Bloggers are simply thinking aloud in most cases and have the benefit of sometimes getting feedback from the peanut gallery (ahem, public). I find this a refreshing change personally.

As I have said in a previous post, if you can put you fingers to a keyboard you can blog. There’s really nothing to it technically, so there goes that excuse too.

Enough about why not to blog; let’s shift the discussion to why you should. And because this is a discussion I’ll leave this up to the comments after simply saying I blog because students and peers have better access to me when needed and I like receiving input from others in a less structured environment. So why do you blog, or if you don’t what would be some good reasons for you to start one?

Luckily, for most people educational technology has little to do with creating Flash applications or spending countless hours trying to get a web script to behave properly. Don’t let the technology tag scare you, most of the time the things we refer to as educational technology are fairly simple to use.

So what is educational technology? In a nutshell, it’s any computer or online tool that makes it easier for you and your students to communicate, collaborate, create, or learn. You can equate it to a real life classroom, but with far fewer constraints and limitations. I like to illustrate it with the following scenario:

Imagine you are a college professor and you have been asked to work with a hundred students who have had difficulty in various humanities classes in their first year of college. Your job is to assess each student’s needs and help them learn the skills they need to succeed in college. Oh, and you have one semester in which to do it and your class meets for an hour twice a week. You can divide the students up into two classes, if that will help. Can you help us out? Think about it for a minute. If you’re like me you are feeling pretty overwhelmed and we haven’t even met the students yet.

So how would you go about tackling this situation? Needless to say this is a nearly impossible task given a standard classroom environment and lots of unknowns. But companies like Sylvan Learning tackle issues like this every day. Okay, so they don’t deal with 100 students at a time, but they still work in fairly large scale with challenging students. How do they, and we, do it? With the right tools and tactics of course. Here are just a few ideas off the top of my head:

• Have students submit all work online – this allows you to look assignments over in your own time and better track your progress. Not only that, but you can give access to aids and colleagues who can help you if you are overwhelmed.
• The same goes for testing. If student assignments can be tested through a multiple choice quiz then by all means use that for assessment. If this is done online then both you and the student get immediate feedback and don’t have to wait until the next class to make adjustments.
• Better is to have students collaborate on assignments, checking each others’ work, drafting papers, and such before it’s ever submitted. I’ve found Google docs to be a great way for students to collaborate. It’s almost like they are sitting right next to each other and talking about the assignment. Sometimes it seems like students communicate better in this medium.
• Have students submit writing assignments to SmartThinking, or other online tutoring services. Smart thinking allows students to submit papers to an online editor who will give them feedback on grammar, mechanics, and content. I’ve found that I have to do a lot less correction on papers that have gone to SmartThinking first.
• Give students a place to communicate with you and with other students. The problem with most classes is that the students usually come up with the really hard questions an hour after they left the classroom and forget them before the next class. Online discussion forums are good because other students may be able to answer their questions as well, taking even more burden off of the instructor.
• A wiki is very useful for creative projects. Students can collaboratively create and edit a wiki page and you basically just sit back and watch the page build itself.

These are just a few ideas using very simple online technology to meet the challenge. The cool thing is that there is almost nothing to learn to use the tools I’ve mentioned here. If you know how to create a document on your computer then you already possess the necessary skills.

By the way, I really do want to know how you would use technology to address the scenario given above.  Click the comment link below to share your ideas. And don’t be afraid to go out and explore some technology; here are some links to get you started:

Related Links

4 Shared http://www.4shared.com/ allows users to share documents online for free.

Google Docs http://docs.google.com online collaboration tools from Google. The editor used looks and acts a lot like MS Office and you can collaboratively create docs, PowerPoints, and more.

PBWorks http://my.pbworks.com/ allows teachers to create a free wiki for use as they see fit. Give it a try, it’s a lot of fun to see what students create.

SmartThinking http://www.smarthinking.com/ Online tutorial and writing services.

I am currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Educational technology at the University of Texas at Brownsville. You can find more information about that and a link to my portfolio in the Educational Technology section of this site.

For those who haven’t heard, Yahoo’s Geocities is on the chopping block. I had been a member of Geocities since it began and had samples of my writing posted on that website. I also had been using Yahoo 360, another defunct Yahoo project, for the same reason. Soon I will be moving my writing samples once again to the writing section of this site and hoping WordPress will be around for a while.

I work for the Defense Language Institute on Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. While I obviously can’t share a lot about what I do on this site for security and privacy reasons, I will be providing related thoughts on the topic of teaching English as a foreign language in the Work section.

Of course the sub-pages of this site are static, rather than being blogs, so the information posted there won’t change as often. The main page is where most of the action will be, so check back often.

Also, don’t forget to check out the side panels of this site where you will find my Flickr album with pictures from my travels in Asia and Europe, and a map showing where I’ve been.