Social Network Letter of Request By Stacy Austin EDU 651 Dr.

Casey Reason November 12, 2012

To: From: Date: Re:

Patricia Duran Stacy Johnson-Austin November 12, 2012 Request to Utilize Social Networking and Wikis in the Classroom

The widespread use of social media sites has become a norm for our students. In order to move our classrooms to the 21st century and to keep up with the ever-changing technological world, integrating social media has become an important tool that can help enhance learning for our students. Most of our students can receive and reply to an instant message on Facebook at the rate of less than 10 seconds per post. Bringing a tool similar to Facebook to the classroom can be beneficial to increasing the skills of our students. Today's youth continues to swarm to social media in droves (McCrea, 2012). With the districts implementation of bring your own device to school, I feel that adding a social media network and a school wide wiki site, will be cost effective and beneficial. Most sites the district has used in the past have added extra costs to the district for the numerous licenses that have had to be purchased. Using a social network site has minimal cost and easily accessible to the students through their wide array of mobile devices. Using a site purchased specifically for our school should make the parents feel comfortable, and passwords can be sent to the parents to monitor their childs usage of the site. A site such as Moxie not only contains a social media component but includes a wiki that will be password protected for the students. It would be privately used by members of the district only.

The benefits of using this feature will benefit the many student athletes in the classroom. While they are traveling to their games, the students can communicate with the teacher to keep up with assignments. Taped versions of the lectures can be uploaded to the site and questions with response from students in the classroom can be added to keep the students involved in the lectures. Questions and answer can be posted to help the students become engaged instantly and receive content they have missed in the classroom. The wiki sites will be dedicated to students collaborating and posting projects online. A site such as PB works allows the teacher to control the online environment, but allow children to communicate and work together to learn a variety of skills. A quick implementation could be tried with one of my classrooms. This trial period will help us work out any problems that may occur and help us to set parameters in case problems arise. This has been tried in many colleges across the country with much success (Davit 2010). Please let us implement this program, I feel this is a key component that will help our students become 21st century learners. Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated. Thank You, Stacy Johnson-Austin 9th Grade Teacher

Devitt, T. I., & LLP, F. &. (2010, 10 18). From Chalkboard to Wall-- Managing the Benefits of SchoolSanctioned Social Media Use. Education World. Mccrea, B. (2012, August 21). The Intersection of Digital Literacy and Social Media. Campus Technology digital magazine. Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms(3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, California, United States: Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.