webinar

I attended the Webinar: “Social Media for Teachers” by Jane Bozarth as the presenter today.  It was hosted on https://ncbionetworkevents.webex.com .  Jane is also the author of “E-learning on a shoestring”.  She discussed several of the social media such as facebook, twitter, pbworks, delicious, wiki, etc.  She defined social media as “content that invites and allows others to contribute.”  She spent a lot of time during the webinar polling us about various uses that we thought we could use this technology for in the classroom.  She asked us to list some benefits and among them were social learning, informal learning, relationship building, community knowledge management, etc.  She also asked us what our organizations would not allow us to do concerning social media.  She discussed how sometimes IT legal or HR finance have concerns with the use of social media.  HR particularly doesn’t want to pay someone who is using social media on company time.  She also polled us as to what the social media can do in terms of what the learner wants.  She discussed how it can move from the traditional view of training and learning.  Case studies, videos, role plays, games, book clubs and discussions can all be conducted in a non-traditional way via social media.  She asked how many were using blogs and wikis.  She explained that blogs are reflective and wikis are collaborative.  She explained how she has used facebook to teach a whole class.  She said she had more participation and more logged in and out of it daily to use it for the discussions and live chats.  She even used it for quizzes.  She said the collaborative activities that are unique to the virtual world are that you can have guest speakers and even realistic practice via this technology.  She asked us how we are inviting interaction with our learners.  She discussed how wikis are more editable by anyone with access as opposed to blogging.  It was very informative and I think I want to learn more from the website:  www.ncbionetwork.org/iet