Social media has invaded every aspect of our lives, including the classroom, and the 2013 school year will be no different. A 2012 study of 4,000 higher education professionals found that a full third (33.8%)of faculty respondents are using social media – including Twitter, Facebook, blogs and wikis – to help make lessons more engaging and real for today’s students.
Now, there is a new participatory media platform called Findery. Founded by Caterina Fake – the entrepreneur behind Flickr and Hunch – Findery is helping make lessons come alive through attaching stories, life events and little known facts to places on a map that only people “in the know” can provide.
Findery is a great resource for educators, and the company has launched a program called Findery U to make it easy to incorporate individual content and participatory media materials into existing lesson plans. Findery U taps into the increased relevance of technology in the classroom to help students better understand and identify with the world around them. The site has developed lesson plans and suggestions for how higher education professionals can use the site to engage their students in an unexpected way.
