Classroom Social Networking

For the first time that I can remember, I was taken outside of my comfort zone today with regards to technology. During our class today we had a virtual speaker, Denise, who is the creator of Reading Revolution. The things she discussed with us today were amazing. She is at the cutting edge of introducing technology into the classroom through the means of social networking and I am glad to be a new teacher in this day in age. Many of my own concerns with having a program like reading revolution in the classroom is mostly in creating differentiation to meet a variety of student needs and technological levels. I am Early Childhood and Special Ed. so throughout the presentation I was constantly trying to find methods to modify a site like this for younger students and students with a variety of needs. When I asked Denise a question parallel to this, she responded by saying that it is still very new and suggested with students very young, simply introduce the concept of social networking through a whole group lesson. This made more sense to me as I simply could not see myself letting a class of 2nd or even 3rd graders onto a site like Reading Revolution without a substantial amount of scaffolding and modeling.

The idea of having social networking in the classroom seems more to be an issue of working out the kinks to make it as successful as possible. Today we also discussed the program 'Second Life' and the avatars that are a part of Reading Revolution. I have had no previous experience of this program at all (today was my first day actually even knowing exactly what it was) and the things that were discussed was simply mind boggling to me. Since I was unfamiliar with the program, I found myself immediately regarding it as a negative thing and couldn't believe and understand how teachers and even professors were integrating this program into curriculum. As I was reflecting and noticing how much I was moved out of my comfort zone, I began to relate myself to the other hundreds of teachers who feel this way everyday with 'simple' technology such as the ELMO or Smart board. Many times they are not given any training before hand on the materials and they are just given to them one day to sort out. I can see how they would be a little turned off and/or resistant to change based on their own level of comfortability. Having felt like this today for a few minutes really opened my eyes to their feelings towards technology and has helped me to develop ways to be out of your comfort zone but still feel like everything is okay.