updated 8/9/2017
Two years ago George Couros came to our school district gave an powerful talk about the importance of using social media as a tool in the classroom. As he was speaking, I began following Couros on Twitter and through him discovered and followed Jennifer Casa-Todd.
Jennifer's blog, Endless Possibilities is a candid reflection of her journey as an educator and parent. She shares ideas and thoughts about a variety of topics including the use of technology and social media. I love learning from her blog posts and was excited when I heard she published the book Social LEADia, which I have now read multiple times.
Social LEADia challenges its readers to move out of their comfort zone, to overcome challenges and to work with students to find opportunities to use social media in authentic and meaningful ways. It is one of the best professional books I have read in a long time.
I reached out to Jennifer Casa-Todd through Twitter and her Social LEADia Facebook group (yes I love the book so much I follow her everywhere). I was interested in joining an online book discussion although I admit Twitter chats make my head spin. Jennifer offered me the opportunity to host a book discussion in her Social LEADia Facebook group. I was honored and suddenly panicked. I have never run an online book discussion and the AUTHOR was going to be a part of it!
This is my first experience with using Facebook for book discussion and I realize some people may be completely new to Facebook so I thought I would give you some tips and the plan for the evening.
- The conversations in the Social LEADia Facebook group are only accessible to the approved members of the group. Please request to join the group to participate.
- Discussion questions will be posted approximately every 10 minutes.
- Please "Comment" to the posted question to discuss. This will keep the conversations organized.
- Some questions are in a Flipgrid format, you maybe record your answer using Flipgrid or type your answer. You may also respond to each other through Flipgrid.
- It has become common practice that if someone is interested in a thread but has nothing to offer they comment "following" so they receive notifications when future comments are made. You do not need to do this. Instead, click on the arrow in the right hand corner of the post and select "Turn on notifications for this post."
- If you are not able to make it for the live chat, please pop in any time with your comments or sharing.
Our hope is that our two evenings of discussion are just the beginning of continuing conversations and sharing so that we can all help our students use social media for learning & sharing their learning, standing up for causes that are important to them, and to be a more positive influence on others: ultimately social media leaders.
I want to thank Jennifer Casa-Todd for her assistance, responding to my questions as we worked together to plan this event. Jennifer also assisted with this blog post and allowed me to use her graphics.
Update 8/9/2017 - Reflections after first Facebook chat
What worked well:
- conversations easy to follow
- replies were not limited to 140 characters
- more in-depth sharing
- smaller group - more meaningful connections
- easy to refer back to conversations
- easy to jump in after the fact to see what discussed and add to conversations
Challenges:
- too many questions - the ability to have longer responses made it hard to keep up
- limited number of people - not open to public (both a pro and con)
- forgot to have people introduce self
- people seemed to like to type more than Flipgrid for this type of limited time sharing
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