Social media a great way to connect!
In 2009 I was fortunate to be able to participate in Microsoft’s Worldwide Innovative Education Forum in Brazil. That year Moliehi Sekese won the Worldwide Innovative Teacher Awards, category educators choice; Best Practice: Moliehi Sekese (Lesotho), “Indigenous Plants”.
Thanks to e-mail and Facebook we managed to keep in touch and met again in Cape Town, South Africa the following year, It was the beginning of a great friendship and this year Moliehi and two of her students visited our school to talk about being a student in Lesotho. Moliehi did a keynote at our education conference this year where she shared her amazing story. Thanks to technology we are now able to Skype with her students on a regular basis, and we enjoy getting to know students in Lesotho. Social media offers so many opportunities for those who have the technology. For countries in Africa and particularly Lesotho this is an obstacle. Projects where students in Western countries help raise money to buy computers and set up wireless Internet in schools without technology, as our students have done, are really worthwhile. Its a win/win since our students see that their efforts count, and perhaps appreciate more being fortunate to live in Norway where every high school student has a laptop. This year our students set aside a day’s work to help students at Mamoeketsi primary school! The result so far: 40.000 dollars. The money will be used for high school scholarships material, exchange visits and hopefully the start of a new school building. We are opening up a channel of communication for students to learn and collaborate. Hopefully this will make a difference.
I agree with you Ann social media contribute a lot in the development of learners academically. Since we started chatting through Skype with students from Norway my learner’s English has improved a lot. Again through links that are posted on Facebook I managed to access information that is relevant to my everyday teaching and learning.