Why schools should stop blocking social network sites.
I love the assignment ideas in this article from Slate and might steal them for myself. Of course students will have to work on them at home and find a school-friendly (read: antiquated) way to present their findings to peers, since my high school blocks these sites for teachers and students as well.
Sigh.
It’s worth a try.
A few of my favorites: “In math class, students could develop statistical models and graphs of the patterns of information flow in their social networks. To understand how advertising works, students from different backgrounds and with different online habits could compare what’s being hawked to them. And for a school journalism project, teams of students could aggregate other students’ narratives from blogs, Facebook, and Twitter and compile a real-time collective analysis of the state of their educational union.”
