Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

1.4.11 | In a recent post on The Tempered Radical blog, Bill Ferriter—a 6th-grade language arts teacher in North Carolina—reveals how a simple idea, filtered through social media, changed his pedagogical world.

On Christmas day three years ago, Ferriter read a tweet that introduced him to Kiva, a microlending site that matches lenders with entrepreneurs trying to start businesses in the developing world. Ferriter felt good about making a contribution to a group of women in Bolivia who wanted to start selling groceries, but he was even more inspired by how Kiva could transform his teaching.

He ended up creating an entire curriculum (he shares pdfs of almost all of it) that takes students through selecting worthwhile groups on Kiva to which to loan money, evaluating the pros and cons of different types of Kiva loans, and deciding on the types of loans that mattered to them.

So far, students in Ferriter’s regular classes and after-school Kiva club have lent almost $6,000 to 146 entrepreneurs in countries all over the world. You can watch videos they’ve made promoting their effort and view Google Maps that track their impact.

Ferriter doesn’t stop at presenting this fairly remarkable teaching curriculum—the majority of his post reflects on the power of social media to inspire both teachers and students.

Teachers, he notes, should never underestimate the power of sharing in a digital world:

Those are important lessons to any teacher using social media spaces. While you can always lurk and learn, sharing matters—even when you aren’t sure that anyone else is listening.

Have a great idea for a lesson? Post it. Have a provocative thought or a challenging question that you’re trying to answer? Post it.

Found a resource that you think is going to be helpful in your own work? Discovered a source of online conversations that matters to you? Come across a hashtag that is full of great conversations?

Post them. Always.

Because there ARE people listening and learning from you—and your thinking and ideas have the potential to spark something significant inside the minds of peers that you’ve never met and to change teaching in ways that you’ll never know.

And teachers should also realize how students need them, even in a social media world in which the students might be more fluent:

I always like to say that our kids can be inspired by technology to ponder, imagine, reflect, analyze, memorize, recite and create—but only after we build a bridge between what they know about new tools and what we know about efficient learning.

Hat tip: Ewan McIntosh

Plus: Speaking of social activism and digital media, The Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida has received a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to promote creative digital approaches to teaching and promoting civics. Some of the ideas include an online “Civil Debate Wall” and and an online course on “Rethinking Citizenship.”