Welcome to Using Web 2.0 and Social Media to Encourage Deeper Learning. We’re really excited to be facilitating this professional development course. Thanks for signing up. This week is all about the big picture - getting oriented, meeting each other and starting to familiarize ourselves with the idea of deeper learning and how it relates to social media and web 2.0.  

Without further ado, let’s dive right in...

Taking this course is easy.  Each week you will be completing a series of tasks. They are listed under the tasks section of the course (see left sidebar). All you have to do is complete the tasks listed for each week.  That’s it!  On most of the tasks we will ask you to post your reflections using the comment function that is a button on the upper right hand of each page.

This week we will introduce the concept of deeper learning.  You will review a couple of readings and go through two self assessments in order to think about the following guiding questions:

• What is deeper learning?
• To what extent am I using social media to promote deeper learning within my classroom/school?  

We will look also look at a short video case study of a school that is using social media effectively. There will also be a brief introduction to the whole class project (Kit).  

Objectives, you will:

• Know something about your colleagues in this class.
• Be able to articulate your own definition of deeper learning.
• Develop initial ideas on how social media can be used to promote deeper learning.   
• Understand the whole class project and how we are going to work on it.

Complete the following 4 tasks this week:  

• Week 1 - Social Task
• Week 1 - Reflective Task
• Week 1 - Practical Task
• Week 1 - Project Task