Experiences with Social Media

My multiple intellience inventory pegs me as a intrapersonal- it is number one on the list -and not interpersonal so I am not a very good candidate Social Media. As I indicated in my introduction, I do not make much use of the media. I am also not a letter writer and email has not motivated me to communicate more frequently with family or friends. With that said, I feel like an onlooker more than a participant in most of the platforms that we have been introduced to throughout the course. I have had to go outside of my comfort zone in sharing information with class members.


If anyone noticed, I started my Blogger account in 2006 but never made any entries. I had no intention of developing it at that point; I was simply exploring the medium. That is also true of my Delicious account: I subscribed to it in 2004, used it aggressively at first and then only sporadically. Some colleagues with whom I have shared the site since 2004 rely heavily on it. My sole purpose for taking the course is to be able to provide instruction to others who wish to use the media and to develop ways to incorpoorate them into a middle school curriculum.


The course has provided a wealth of resources that I am sure I will be continuing to explore long after the course is over. For example, my most recent search in Technorati using "middle school libraries" uncovered a site entitled Free Rice that is a vocabulary builder. For every correct word, the site donates rice to the U. N. World Food Program. The site has been a hit with my students and staff.

I have a new perspective about the media - their inter-connectivity. Previously I viewed Blogger, Delicious, Flickr et alia as self-contained and independent, but the course has shown how to draw all of the applications together and to meld them into a framework that is uniquely one's own.