Webcast Details
Aired on: January 20th, 2015
3:30–4:30 p.m. (ET)
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Our Guest(s) This Week
Patrick O'Connor
Dr. Patrick “Pat” O’Connor, NDPC Fellow, coordinates the teacher education programs in Career-Technical Education at Kent State University, Kent, OH. He is the author of Improving Reading for Academic Success: Strategies for Enhancing Adolescent Literacy, with Bill Bintz and Renee Murray. In addition to teaching, Dr. O’Connor conducts research in the areas of high-performance workforce, career-technical teacher education, and at-risk youth interventions.
William Kist
Dr. William “Bill” Kist has researched and developed classroom uses for new media for more than 15 years for all grade levels. A former middle school and high school language arts teacher, Dr. Kist is an associate professor in the School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies at Kent State University. A highly regarded expert in the area of literacy and new media, Dr. Kist is the author of books on this subject including New Literacies in Action, The Socially Networked Classroom, and The Global School.
This Week's Topic
Student engagement is a challenging issue for all classroom instructors. Because the world outside operates at “warp speed” compared to the pace in the classroom, students tend to “power down” at the start of the school day. In this Using Social Media to Engage Learners webcast, literacy and social media experts Bill Kist and Patrick O’Connor will share strategies to engage learners—and at-risk students in particular—through social media tools such as texting, blogging, and tweeting, and will discuss how introducing social media into the classroom is one way to improve reading skills as well as reach students who learn differently. Using Social Media to Engage Learners will:
- Address misconceptions about what social media is and is not
- Share examples of how using social media in the classroom can result in increased student engagement without replacing traditional instructional tools
- Demonstrate how social media literacy can contribute to a student’s lifelong learning
Resources:
(2014). NDPC/N Newsletter: Engaging the Disengaged Learner – Volume 24, Number 4 
.
Kist, W. (2014). Resources to Accompany Episode 58 .
Kist, W. (2014). Social Media Resources .
Kist, W. (2014). The Socially Networked Classroom .