The principal of New Milford N.J. High School has nearly 12,300 Twitter followers his handle: @NMHS_Principal. He and his teachers use Facebook to communicate with students and parents, and students use it to plan events. In class, teachers routinely ask kids to power up their cellphones to respond to classroom polls and quizzes. Rather than ban cellphones, Sheninger calls them “mobile learning devices.”He replaced the schools “static, boring” website with what has become a heavily used Facebook page, and his teachers encourage students to research, write, edit, perform and publish their work online.
via Social media find place in classroom – USATODAY.com.
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About Dr. Bob- Blog Curator
Bob’s has focused his expertise in technology integration in the K-12 community and teacher education. This expertise touches many different aspects of technology and learning. Areas of particular interest include: Learning, Computational Thinking and STEM, Mobile Learning, 1:1 technology initiatives, problem and project- based learning. Bob's experiences have been enhanced through collaborations with Bonnie Bracey-Sutton who formerly worked as President Clinton’s 21 Century Educator and Raymond Rose who formerly was part of the Concord Consortium, a non profit research and development corporation and the lead institution in developing one of the first virtual high schools in the nation. Other important influences include work at Learning Sciences Research Institute as Senior Research Associate at the University of Illinois Chicago where he was involved with studies of best practices of teacher education and technology. Additional experiences include, working with John Bransford at Vanderbilt University’s Learning Technology Center as Project Coordinator for the school’s Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology Grant (PT3). The grant, national in scope, was responsible for disseminating and helping to implement research on learning and technology into grant activities and the activities of grant partners.
Bob now heads up the IRIS Connect project at the University of Mississippi and is part of the Mobile Learning Portal Project at the University of Texas - Austin. The Portal project involves Dr. Paul Resta, who holds the Ruth Knight Millikan Centennial Professorship in Instructional Technology and serves as Director of the Learning Technology Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
The principal of this school is breaking out and trying something unique with the students in his school. I couldnt agree more with the way he says that its”naive to think that kids raised online will respond to school the same way as previous generations”. Kids now have so many things such as facebook, twitter and youtube. Not only do they have it but they use them and work them. They have found a way to stay in touch with their friends, family, people they may work with or play sports with. With Iphones, Ipads and a steady access to the inernet and social media sights. Its a vastly different world that kids these days gorw up in and thus the way things are done are different. So, why would the way to educate the children be different? I think this school is onto something and its very interesting to see what will come of it.
The most important thing that this does is that it makes learning personal, it gives the student ownership, and it meets the student where he/she is. The most important thing that is happening has technology become mobile is customization of learning.
What Sheninger has done sounds like an excellent idea. The part where the post talks about how “it is naïve to think that kids raised online will respond to school the same way as previous generations”, is very true. Kids today are exposed and raised differently than those of the past, so why not try a new approach to teaching them? The vast majority of high school kids all have Facebook and Twitter accounts and use them requently. With the smartphones that are now out there its even easier for people to gain access to these social sights. Using them as a learning tool is possibly a new way of reaching the students or a new way of getting them involved in school work. Instead of banning the things that are such a vital part of everyday life these days incorporate them into the school enviroment. I like what this school is doing and perhaps it will work as planned. Its going to be very interesting to see if more schools will experiment with such methods and if they will continue in the future to continue to do things in this manner.