 Welcome to our presentation called Leveraging Social Media to Flatten Your Classroom Walls as part of the K-12 online conference with the theme Learn, Share, Remix. Each morning I check my email before heading off to school where I am a fourth grade classroom teacher in Kansas. In my inbox I responded to emails, one from Paula about scheduling a time for our classes to do an introductory Skype call as a get-to-know-you activity at the beginning of the school year. The other was a request from a Minnesota fourth grade teacher looking for a partner class to be guest readers in each other's class during the upcoming Global Read Aloud Project of the book The One and Only Ivan. Another email was a discussion notice from the classroom 2.0 Ning that a comment had been posted. I'd also received an email that was a Twitter direct message from Rebecca, whom I met at ISD-12 in San Diego, wanting to bounce around an idea for connecting our classes. As I do the same thing in Louisiana before heading off to school, I find an email from Jan reminding me that our classes will be doing a Skype call to Stack Oreo Cookies for the O-R-E-O project which is hosted by Jen Wagner in California as part of her projects by Jen. I also have a Google Calendar email reminder about moderating 4th Chat on Twitter and add moto notifications from my students who were replying to assignments. My Skype I am reminds me that my class will be doing a mystery Skype call with another 4th grade class. I also have a Google Chat notice from Bill Kay reminding me that a group I am connected with will be completing a conference proposal about our global classroom projects in a Google Hangout that evening. Is this how your day begins? How did we get so connected? Let us share with you the various social media tools we leverage to flatten our classroom walls. We both began finding connections on NINGS way back when. In fact that is how Paula and I met on a NING in the summer of 2009 and started figuring out how we could connect our classrooms and collaborate with each other. Some NINGS you might consider joining to find connections are the Classroom 2.0 NING, the Flat Classroom Project NING, the Flipped Learning Network NING, and the Educators PLN NING to just name a few. From there we started using Skype as our tool of choice to connect our two classes because our 4th graders did not need to sign up for anything. We simply set a date to Skype and put our students in front of the webcam and it took off from there. Of course we learned how to turn a Skype call into a learning call, assign Skype jobs to our students, and set up an Edmeto Skype collaboration group so that some of our students could back channel during our Skype calls. We have used Skype to flatten our classroom walls by sharing poems, readings, songs, as you will see in this video. Also doing collaborative projects such as the OREO Project and in math, data collection and graphing, or having authors Skype into our classroom as you will see in this video. Good morning boys and girls, how y'all doing? Good! Yay! Good morning Mr. Jerry! Good morning! I am Skyping in from Florida and I want to show you today how I wrote one of my many activity booklets. This one today was on the Energy Kit. I've written many books on energy, on lawyer, on job awareness, on careers, electric history, where the little lightbulb gifts is juiced. Now we do magazine books exploring your environment. One great event happened recently about the environment. Every April we celebrate. Right now I'm working on a book on water, revising it. And what was our big project we did for Earth Day, Nicholas? We decorated these bags for Earth Day. What part of Florida are you from? Let's see, I live, I don't know if you know, on the east coast of Florida, south of West Palm Beach, or right near Jupiter Island, where Tiger Woods and Saliti are living. In this next video, Paula's class shares a guest speaker. Mr. Adams, would you please introduce yourselves to us and to Ms. Wells' class in Kansas. Sure. My name is James Adams. I'm here today to talk to you about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. So I hope you get some really good questions about this. I've already given me a lot of questions. Yeah, I sent Mr. Adams our list that we generated, so that he has your list of questions. Can you all see that in Kansas? What are you seeing? Um, a three-headed eagle. Ah, very good. What do you think a three-headed eagle might represent? Just raise your hands. Anybody in Kansas think they have an answer? I have to speak with you all because I'm very passionate about the Constitution. I love the Constitution. I think it's the greatest document that was written in this country's history. Our Constitution was written in 1787. Prior to our Constitution, our country was ruled by the Articles of Confederation, which was basically an agreement between the 13 different states. Unfortunately, it had some problems. It was very, very difficult. Another way we've used Skype to flatten our walls is by having a celebrity speak about anti-bullying. Let's look at this video. Sharing projects our students have done, such as Mardi Gras research, and stayed in a container exhibits. Doing mystery Skype calls, or doing impromptu calls. Next, we decided to increase our personal learning networks and join Twitter. Did you know you could benefit from Twitter by following these steps? Go to www.twitter.com forward slash search. Then type in a hashtag such as pound sign mystery Skype, or pound SS chat, which stands for social studies chat. And you can see the tweets without even having a Twitter account. But you can only truly be connected on Twitter when you join the conversation, which you need an account to do. Then, like us, you can tweet about your mystery Skype calls with other classes or other global projects you are participating in. Get comments on your classroom blog or your student's individual kid blogs by using the hashtag comments for kids. Discover other projects to join like global read aloud and quad blogging. Share surveys your students made to gather data for math classes. Join educational chats, such as LM chat and 4th chat, where we learn so much to take back to our classrooms. Help each other learn new tools over the summer, such as Edmodo and Google Hangouts, because of Twitter conversations we've had. Use a Twitter class account to do live tweeting from a field trip. Tweet about connections made between classes, such as when a student in my class won a Glogster contest sponsored by a student in a Wisconsin classroom. Speaking of Edmodo, Paula and I had our classes start using it during the 2009-2010 school year. Edmodo is another great social media tool you need to leverage for you and your students. You can join communities and share best practices, ask questions, share lesson ideas, find other teachers to connect with. Have your students join collaborative groups to do projects together, identity day or global read aloud, two others to mention are pen pals who write and virtual USA. Also, extend the learning and conversations with a Skype collaboration group for summer reading. Do professional development through Edmodo to find even more connections and ways to flatten your classroom walls. Facebook tends to be the social media site that many think of as a way to connect with family members and high school classmates. Have you ever used Facebook as a professional tool? There are so many ways to use Facebook to find connections and projects. Here are some examples. If you'd like, you can like their page to follow them. International.day Choose to matter Youth choose to matter Classroom blogging buddies For educators by educators Some teachers have a class Facebook page to update parents. Many web tools you use have a Facebook page where educators share innovative ways they use the tools in their classroom. Pinterest burst onto the scene and took the social media world by storm. This site allows you to pin things you find online to boards you create on different topics. It quickly rose to the third largest social media site. When I first discovered it, like many social media sites, I saw it was mostly being used for personal reasons. Boards for wedding planning and crock pot recipes seem to dominate. It didn't take long for me and other educators to see the power of creating educational theme boards and connecting with other like-minded educators on Pinterest. When I need some common core information, Pinterest boards on CCSS is now one of the first places I check. You might also like to check out Global Project Pins, Project Based Learning Boards, My Boards on Pinterest, which are mostly educational, and also Jan's Boards on Pinterest. Do you want to create a sign-up for classes to Skype with or collaboratively on a presentation like Jan and I did for the K-12 online conference? Well, Google Docs is the best way to do that, in my opinion. We have used Google Docs for everything from Skype sign-ups, such as my Mardi Gras Skype one, to locate other classrooms that use a Twitter account, to find motor groups to join, and we've even had our students create surveys using the forms part of Google Docs to gather data for math classes. Over this past summer, we learned how to use Google Hangouts as a video conferencing tool. It is quickly becoming our favorite video conferencing tool. Why? Because it's totally free, and up to 10 people think classes can video conference at one time. We have done several Google Hangouts now as part of our personal professional development, and have even helped other members of our PLN give presentations on Google Hangouts. The quality of Hangouts has remained constant with almost no lag or screen freezes like you often get on Skype. I've been on a Google Hangout where five of the participants were in countries as far away as India and South America, and we had a great connection. In fact, my first mystery location call this year was done via a Google Hangout instead of Skype. Currently, Jan and I and other connected educators from our PLN are working on ways to leverage Google Hangouts to flatten our classroom walls during this school year. Some of the ideas that have been generated include inviting other classes to work on math problems together, having a class of older students read the several classes of younger students at one time, having several classes write a collaborative book together, sharing about your state or region, sharing your best science demo with several other classes, having a guest speaker present to several classes at once. As these projects unfold, we are certain that even more ways will come to mind. We envision Google Hangouts becoming a regular part of our blended classroom during the 2012-2013 school year. Sometimes, after years of collaborating online, you have the opportunity to meet face to face like Paula and I did this summer for ISTI in San Diego. We are setting up a challenge for you. Please fill out this Google form or add to this spreadsheet and tell us the next step you're going to do to use social media to flatten your classroom walls. I find when I tell others I'm going to do something in my classroom, I tend to get it done. Thank you to everyone involved with the K-12 Online Conference 2012 for the opportunity to present this session. As always, with everything we collaborate on, Paula and I have learned some new skills and have fun while doing so. We hope you have enjoyed our presentation and that you will take us up on the challenge.