Digital Text Reflection

I decided to make a whiteboard video. It was pretty user friendly and easy to learn. I chose it because I like watching videos where there is someone drawing on the whiteboard, while someone else talks. However, I didn't make it in relation to my content area. Since we were just playing around, I made it more fore amusement. 

I think that this digital text could be useful in the classroom because it gives the students the opportunity to be creative and apply it to their content area. For example, students can use these types of videos to give summaries of concepts in a way other than in a paragraph. They can draw it out like a diagram or create a dialogue. Either way they can personalize it and share with others. I thought it was pretty fun and I know they would too. You can find my short video here.

http://goanimate.com/videos/00Iut-FPJwiA?utm_source=linkshare&utm_medium=linkshare&utm_campaign=usercontent

There were a few things that stuck out to me from the reading. It starts out talking about how social media can give more people the opportunity to participate. People feel that they can contribute to something because they feel like they can connect with individuals. I think that is a great way to think of social media and science. Sometimes science is intimidating for people, but when you bring it to their level, they will be more willing to engage. They also said that teachers should fill the gap between in-class literacy and out-of-class literacy. Adolescence especially spend a lot of time online anyways. If we as teachers can give them educational resources at sites that they are already visiting, then we can expose them to more literacy than they even realize. For example, NASA has a twitter account. It is easy to get fun facts and it is right at their finger tips. It would be more fun for them.

I like that the tweets are linked to substantial articles and other artifacts that back up the statements. This is good because then the student will have access to more information when they are interested. I think it is a really smart idea for teachers to start using social media for educational purposes. We live in a different time, where a lot of time is spent online. Instead of resisting that in schools, it might be better to just embrace it. You will most likely have a better relationship with the students, but they will also engage more in learning.