Concrete Classroom

I just recently read a fascinating blog post by Michael Kaechele. He has his students designing and producing games on the Internet that they share with students in Vietnam. The students seemed very eager about doing this. They were a few drawbacks though. Because of the time difference between the United States and Vietnam the students were not able to get to know each other well enough as he would have liked them to. They were trying to use Skype but no time was good for either classes. He encouraged his students to interact with them through Facebook or email.
This project was a very creative way to get his students connected with others around the world. This also promotes culturally diversity which is needed in today's society. This project helped me realize that there are different ways to get your students connected with others and that you can mix it up and make it where its mainly the students being able to get creative and help out.

Michael Kaechele wrote a very informative blog post on how social media is being used to help citizens in different countries speak out about the injustices they are facing. He goes on to talk about what is going on in Egypt and how they used facebook and twitter to plan "the day of rage." Now Egypt has shut down SMS messages and ISP connections. Kaechele goes on to talk about how countries are no longer going to be able to get away with what their doing because with the advances in social media, people are being able to inform others about what's going on. With this he asked the question of how do we let our students know this? In my response I talked about how teachers and future teachers could use this as a social studies lesson, maybe dealing with current issues that day. By doing this it would help students see that people are using these sites to reach out for help and not to just socialize. This can now be something that helps us change dictatorships!