Future Vision Project Post #3: Getting Wonky

Fact: Some weekends you just eat a lot of chocolate.

Coming to terms....

Moving on.

Gosh, this world is full of distractions. I can't even write a blog post because I'm too "busy" checking out all the new exciting blogs I now follow via Feedly. Reading posts by the Bears (Go Bears!) is productive. Random food blogs, not so much. Although, I'm pretty sure this is a great idea.

Food blogs. We love them! (Ok I  do, and I can't comprehend that you might not share my enthusiasm.) Because every body eats, right? Everybody is always hungry, right? Oh wait, that's likely just me and my hubby who also has an absurdly speedy metabolism. Thank goodness for peanut butter! Regardless, food is about sharing. We dine with our friends. We bring treats to our nephews. We gather for random potluck lunches with our staff... Then we pass out the recipe cards. Or, more and more often, we cite a food blog. Once you hop onto the foodblog train, you just keep riding. The stops are endless. Ideas zig zag back and forth. Photos, videos, tidbits of wisdom and foolishness keep us informed and entertained as we try on new sites and authors.

Essentially, what we're looking at is a community driven my similar interests as opposed to geographical location.

As educators, we see the need for community in our classrooms. Educator Annie Shaw cites community as the starting place for learning. As learners, we require a place of safety and sharing. Often, we speak of developing a community of readers.

We want our students to be lifelong readers. We want them to have choice, to engage with various texts and to make connections to those texts. While reading is in some ways a solitary activity, it's surely more fun and exciting when we share the experience with others. This spring, many of us will be participating in community runs, such as the TC 10km or the Goddess Run. Many of our training challenges occur in isolation but the excitement of running with a community powers our initiative. And also allows for increased chocolate consumption.

So I'm interested in community. It is, afterall, what made this course of far greater interest to me than any of the TL courses I have pecked away at so far. Students need to engage in a classroom community, but they also need to learn the skills associated with engaging in an online community.

As my contact with students is limited to library times, an online community is of particular interest to me as it is not hampered by the confines of geographical limits.

 Thus, I plan to examine the question:

How can teaching students to use social media create a community of readers in my school?

Likely, I will use a blog to record my ideas. I'm not set on this platform but I am trying to consider how I can best present my ideas in a simple and straightforward manner. I am also considering the use of a Facebook page but I need to decide why I would use that site and if the reasons warrant the result.

Oh, and I plan to focus on the Destiny Quest Website and the way in which it's functions can be used to see students making lists, and sharing recommendations. I would like to jump from this site, where students will learn about responsible use and build community, to a second platform in which students share about a particular book in a larger, more in depth way. I had considered booktrailers but I don't have the iPad access to support this and I'm not super keen on the windows program. If anyone has suggestions, please chime in.

And if all this comes to nought, I'll probably just throw together a video like the one below. I'll tweak the topic for teacher librarians. They're usually up for a good rant.

Citation:
Willy Wonka Photography: Flickr