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I really like this idea! Current students are so absorbed in social media, so I like the idea to put what they see to good use and further the conversation. I also think this would be a very effective way to get students engaged in their learning.

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I also agree with this. It's important that in the future, I keep up with what is trending so I can use it to relate with my students. As an early childhood teacher, there's a possibility that i could be teaching elementary kids and we allll know how they love trends. It could be as simple as incorporating "babyyyy shark doooo dooo dooo dooo" into the classroom.

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In this post the author, Ben Rimes, discusses how a trend has been forming that focuses on student centered learning. He also points out how teachers are trying to incorporate this into such a rigid curriculum schedule. and the worry of testing later on. However, he provides an idea that he simply came up with himself. Students can have conversations with "in-the-moment", as he calls it, resources on social media. We can pick the image or subject and students are able to run with it and find questions they have. Students gather the information from this image and it can be applied to conversations students can have as well.

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"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." - Thomas Jefferson

Half of our district received training from Apple this summer on the concept of Challenge Based Learning. While many educators are quickly overwhelmed by Apple's take on the latest instructional trend of student-centered learning sweeping the United States, many teachers in my district understand the need to introduce more inquiry and real world based education into our curriculum. The problem is, many educators question how and where such necessary learning fits into an increasingly cramped and compacted curriculum, especially with more high-stakes testing coming down the road.

Most, if not all educators, understand why we need to change education, we just have a difficult time seeing how we're going to do it under ever-increasing mandates. My rather snarky reply is...."bring the real world into class discussion using social media!" If we are to take Jefferson at his word, and acknowledge that a great deal of our democracy is indeed mob rule at its most basic level, then why not help students better understand the mob, and perhaps help cultivate a more critical thinking mob for the future?

I found the image above from an Occupy Wall Street protester via Facebook this morning, and while I'm not trying to advocate for one side of the debate over the other, what value could you have in using this image for an impromptu conversation in an economics or political science course? As an educator, I know that fantastic unplanned conversations still happen in the classroom, pushing back important curriculum. The challenge then is to create a "planned" unplanned conversation using "in-the-moment" images, videos, and other resources shared via social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. You don't need to have the entire platform unblocked for students, and it certainly doesn't take much to follow a few interesting resources on the social networking platform of your choosing to get this kind of great "real world" content. And best yet, it opens up some of the more sanitized black and white conversations in the classroom to a little bit of the real world "blurriness". Storify is an excellent tool to bring such details, opinions, and resources together:

You can frame the entire challenge in a 30 or 40 minute conversation; The essential question has already been posed, and it would be quite simple to add the challenge of "how do we get people to communicate?" by asking your students some guiding questions such as "do you see any differences, or commonalities between following the rules in the real world and in the school building?". You could even make this challenge homework, and ask the students to come up with half a dozen more questions each, helping reinforce that learning is questioning in a meticulous fashion. Who knows, they might even hop on their social network of choice in the evening to dig around for more examples of the debate and controversy surrounding the topic you choose.

It would then only be a matter of selecting the proper learning activities, resources, and guiding discussions that would help answer the common questions your students come up with; almost like a contractor selecting the right tools to add a new addition to a house after consulting with the home owner on what's needed. Or am I being a little too "ivory tower" on this one? As an educator that always strove to integrate some aspect of social studies or civics in my lessons (where appropriate), I'm thinking this would be an effective, and practical, way to kick off a challenge or inquiry based learning experience.

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Social Media as Challenge Based Learning Prompt

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"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." - Thomas Jefferson Half of our district received training from Apple this summer on the concept of Challenge Based Learning. While many educators are quickly overwhelmed by Apple's take on the latest instructional trend...

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In wanting to be a history teacher for middle school I need to find new ways to keep my students interested. In social studies I am to provide my students with historical and current events. This idea incorporates both. History can get boring and dull which means it is hard to get my students interested in learning history. Having them try to find similarities through social media about what happened in the past and now is a way to get them involved. I feel like this would be a great way to connect today's events to events in the past as well

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Today students are so disconnected from learning and are all about social media. Teachers are looking for ways to connect students to what they are learning. In having students make the connections through the picture or subject given to them it puts them in control. Its been shown that if students are given the reigns to their own learning they become much more engaged. I know it can be hard to hand this over to your students but it can be benefcial for them in the long run as well. They were able to make their own connections and have meaningful conversations with their fellow classmates as well.