I have been looking over the changing dynamics of communication since I started the Podcast Academy Blog in 2007. At that time, this blog was mainly for an educational discussion of podcasting for classroom use and to support workshops on that topic.

I have continued to look at using podcasting in the classroom and for staff development within an organization and found there to be compelling evidence that this technology could improve student learning and communication as a whole. That said, the web has undergone a major transformation in social media within the last 24 months. Groups of people across many different demographic boundaries have embraced social media as a means of communication. This realm is no longer for the technology pioneer, it has reached critical mass for the general public.

For educators, I think the time has come to examine specific technology tools as being required for student learning in the classroom in conjunction with their class assignments. I am not proposing that we create another technology class where they learn this skill in isolation; in fact, I am maintaining the opposite approach. These tools would be used everyday within the classroom. Students should use these tools with the ease and fluency that they currently use a pencil. The focus should not be on the technology use itself; but rather, it should become on the quality and communication of ideas and thought processes that the student generates. As students become more comfortable with the technology, teachers could generally allow the student to pick the tool that best suites his method of communication.

It has been stated that a single week of the N.Y. Times contains more information than a single person was exposed to in their entire life during the 1800’s. The Industrial Revolution started our society on a path toward constant evolution and development. The technology race that has been started during the cold war has caused a society to evolve into one that is information based. The “Knowledge Base” of our society is in constant change and growing at an exponential rate. The skill a student needs to survive in this “Information Age” is not only their own personal knowledge base, but also how to search out AND communicate information broadly and effectively.

The Classroom Communication Tool Kit for 21st Century Learners

• Email = person to person communication

• Twitter = informal statements and questions on classroom topics to share with whole group. Examples: Announcement of blog posts, wiki posts

• Blog = formal writing and publishing

• Audio/video Podcast = multimedia formal publishing

• All of these materials can then be pulled into a class WIKI where it can be sorted, posted, search, and referenced.

It has been discussed in educational circles for many years that students should keep a portfolio of materials to document their progress across the duration of their learning. It would be valuable to be able to point out student progress at various times during their educational career. A portfolio would also serve as a documentation of accomplishments as the students move into different phases of their lives as well as a personal knowledge base to draw upon as required.

One of the largest problems with keeping this type of document is the amount of paper generated and the ability to quickly search that information as needed. Blogs and wikis serve this process by allowing keyword indexing as well as direct searching for text. I personally feel a wiki is the best possible tool for this job, whereas you can save several topics (subjects) of discussion and allow cross referencing of the information with posts of thoughts and notes. A wiki can serve as a personal knowledge base where a person can post and store a wide range of information that they feel they will need to have quick access to at another time. Wikis can be a little overwhelming for students to start with and blogs will allow much of the functions of search in a little more structured presentation.

Twitter or a micro-blogging format can serve many formats. If Micro-blogging is new to you, the format allows 140 characters per post. You must state your statement concisely. You can choose to use hyperlinks for articles, media or geo-tagging, but their use counts against your 140 character limit. Posters have taken to using services like Tiny URL to compress links into 25 character hyperlinks to allow more information to be communicated. Hash tags (#) can be used to allow searching of information at a later date.

Twitter’s real power comes from the network of people you choose to follow and whom choose to follow you. If you have a quality group of followers you can use Twitter as a quick link to information. The best quote I have seen states the following: “ Twitter users are to collective intelligence as individual firing of neurons are to the brain.” Taking the time to cultivate a well rounded network of people you follow can lead you to information you may not have found on your own.

Twitter also allows collective communication within work groups. Its classroom usage could be very powerful. Consider a classroom where the students are actually allowed to post tweets directed to classroom topics during class, and that information is collected by hash tag and reviewed by the teacher after class to be responded to. This response could come in the form of additional tweets or as a blog or wiki post. The important thing to consider is that ALL students would choose to follow the class account and could respond directly to the person asking the question. The “Knowledge Base” becomes a true collective of the group. Tweets are delivered in real time and can be searched in real time. Students could use Tiny URL to link information from their personal knowledge bases and blog/wiki posts for others to consume and in turn comment upon.

The real power of this type of documentation and communication toward the educational process would show in the strength of the student’s ideas. The ideas and questions presented would have to stand up to the scrutiny of not only their teacher, but their classmates, peers and the global audience as a well. I have sampled several different students at different grade levels this year, and all report that they would give their writing more time and effort if they knew it was to be posted on the Internet where anyone could see it.

As stated before, a major concern is the large amount of data that would be put together and keeping track of it. Teachers will need to learn new ways of dealing with electronic information so that they can quickly sort and sift student information.

RSS Feeds (Really Simple Syndication) allow the quick aggregation of various feeds of information. Flock of Tweets allows a teacher to create an RSS feeds from multiple Twitter accounts in order to quickly gain access to Tweets in a manageable form across selected student accounts. Tweets can be placed inside blogs and RSS feeds can be fed into blogs as well using widgets and java script without having to learn how to code the features yourself.

There are various ways you can combine RSS Feeds to allow combined consumption. You may wish to consider using this application RSS Voyage. ( http://tinyurl.com/o9pxg2) Using this service, teachers could take a RSS feed from every student blog and feed it to one address where they would be able to see student discussions in a chronological form. This same feed can be address to the class to allow them to access the class publications as a whole.

Writing skills are vital for communication; however, today’s society is now evolving to center around video as a form of communication. Visual communication is king right now. Statements like “A picture is worth 1000 words” are examples of society’s view of images and or video. It is only natural that writing skills should lead toward multimedia communication. It can also be very motivational for students who will desire to create in the format that is generally the one they consume the most.

Flip video recorders, mp3 players, and digital cameras all serve as a means to document and digitize data to allow its entrance into the electronic pathways for publication. Their price points have fallen to the point where they are affordable for general classroom use.

Students could and should be collecting information in a digital format about their experiences both in the classroom and outside of it such as field trips. One example of use could be that after a field trip, students should be able to create a presentation to discuss what was learned and how it was relevant to the discussions within class. This could be posted to a blog post and then shared among the class members.

This type of assignment should be a standard assignment after an outside experience. Students would know in advance they are responsible for documentation and presentation of their ideas. It would serve as a way to substantiate what the student gained by the experience and also encourage higher order thinking and reflection about the experience after the student returns to the school. Allowing the students to share out in a digital format would allow a quick exposure to the different perceptions of the experience within the classroom.

As time passes and students become more comfortable with digital publication, you should see a continued improvement on both the quality of the content and the quality of production because the students know that their ideas now have a global voice.

I would expect to see test scores and other types of tests improve due to the higher order thinking involved in producing a multi-media presentation and the broadening vocabulary they will be exposed to as global learners.

This post is ©2009 Mark Quinn All Rights Reserved.