brainwashing kids with facebook

Having only been a facebook user for a week, I already see it could be a powerful tool to use in education. The concept of social networking really applies to classroom. Once you have everyone in a class linked up as friends you can start to really develop niches for students to want to fit into.

Groups would be great way to get people with similar interests together online. Say a history group that as a teach you could seed with topics that come from class and get people involved online. Quizzes or some of the other tools could be used to spark competition by the students to get the high score.

Collaboration could really be leveraged for group projects or other kinds of things were groups of students need organizing help. They could use the tools to track assignments and divide work and as teacher you could see if they were keeping up or where they need more help.

Another key element, one I blogged before is parental involvement. If you could get the parents of you students into facebook you could get them engaged with pictures of their kids, seeing their kids content, making a connection to home life that could really help kids be interested. If as a teacher you post an activity or something for the parents to do over the weekend, the kids would come in the next week without realizing they had been schooled!
Parents could connect with other parents, and provide feedback to the teacher as to topics to cover, things their kids might be more interested in, it could really be a good way to communicate without much effort to a lot of people involved in a classroom.

There is also a lot of fun things you could do with some of the applications that could be used to link into many topics. From the environment to economics and math there are so many options it is crazy. Kids now are so computerized this will continue to be a way to break into all the noise of their life and get more focus on education.

Facebook is a fantastic tool that has many educational uses, that I hope more and more teachers will see and leverage the technology in their classrooms.

Eric Smith

Powerpoint Software

I think the one of the most useful things about PowerPoint that most people have never heard of is PowerPoint Software.
And by software I mean simple user interactive information presentation system. Using slides to illustrate things around a concept. Having a home page with things to click on that bring you to new slides and those can have embedded video, pictures or other content to view and then return to a home page. Saving the PowerPoint as a presentation only so it is not editable and can only be used as a display for the end user.
There are many places that this could be useful in a classroom. At a classroom computer students could select the file or you could have a PowerPoint app built to help find presentations you have made and use a portal to the current information. This way you can have people exploring information without help from a teacher hopefully adding to the information you have presented.
This could also be used at home either from a web page or distributed somehow for home use. People could have the information for a time and then an in class quiz or something to ensure people have viewed it.
Some of the topics that would work really well are thing like History or Science topics where you have many different types of media to use in teaching. Documents, pictures, sound could all come together in an presentation to be explored in a more interesting way then simply clicking a web page or many files in a folder.
I think this kind of thing is a great way to get students involved in a technological way but easy to design and build applications for specific topics quickly customizable for classes as needed.

ERIC SMITH