Presented at New Learning Technologies Conference (Society for Applied Learning Technology) Caribe Royale Hotel Orlando, Florida March 4-7, 2014 Social media enables us to capture students’ learning artifacts so that we can assess learning. We can also use social media to document teachers’ activity in their Personal Learning Networks for which they would be accountable to create for their professional development. These can be thought of as students’ and teachers’ LearnStreams. Motivated by our experience with lifestreaming, we can aggregate our social media streams to generate LearnStreams! Once we have these LearnStreams, we can publish them to demonstrate our students’ learning and teachers’ professional development in order to “tell our story” in a more compelling way to our constituents who we hope would then advocate for us as we build financial and political support for education.

1. What Can Social Media Aggregation
Contribute to Advocating for
Education?
Thomas I. M. Ho, Ph.D.
@DrThomasHo
http://LrnStrm.com

2. Getting the job done!
• Assess learning
• Accountability
• Advocate

3. Why MUST we do it?
Transparency
• Student accountability
• Teacher encouragement
• Education advocacy

4. Student accountability
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•
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Learning artifacts
Positive digital identities
Electronic portfolios
Badges

5. Teacher encouragement
• Personal learning networks
• To complement other evidence such as
students’ performance

6. Education advocacy of
Public Policy
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•
•
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School choice
Teacher evaluation
High-stakes testing
Parent trigger

7. HOW will we do it?
• Give up some CONTROL
• Make teachers responsible to have Personal
Learning Networks
• Assess student learning via social media

8. Social media & Web 2.0
• Twitter
• Diigo
• Blog

9. Aggregate social media
into LearnStreams
• http://friendfeed.com/drthomasho
• RebelMouse
(https://www.rebelmouse.com/drthomasho/)
• Storify (example)
• Smore (Hoosier.DrThomasHo.com)
• Yahoo Pipes (example)
• IFTTT