Social Media for 8 year olds?

First of all, I am currently taking a course under my Educational Technology minor entitled: Using Digital and Social Media in Education. We haven't gotten too far into yet we are just now creating our own personal learning networks (PLN), after looking around at what the different PLN's can look like in the virtual world. I've followed blogs, I have participated in a tweetchat, followed my classmates on twitter (who are basically all grad student's), and now have created my own blog to start my own, personal PLN.

I am all for using all the technology possible in the classroom, a classroom should have no virtual walls. I say connect with an elementary class in California so your students in Iowa can experience another part of the country, have your students tweet, post to a blog, and respond to one another all while teaching those important 21st century skills. Using social media in the classroom isn't scary, and yes, you do still have to teach your students the skills they need to be safe while using all forms of social media. To support my thinking I have found a great article written by Beth Holland on Edutopia, she looked into a classroom that used social media to master effective communication, exploration, and their online voice.

I've given you a small glimpse into me as an educator by sharing some of my views on using social media. Another part of this whole teacher thing I have found that I really enjoy is creating curriculum, I am very aware this will look a lot different when I actually have a classroom, students to teach, standards to meet, and 180 days. As of right now I'll go crazy creating a thematic units that are meaningful - well I think they are meaningful they haven't ever been tested beginning to end...That being said, I found another little article that explores how the trends of the 21st century are changing the way curriculum is being written. Tina Barseghian wrote about students not getting to study what they like until their third year of college, I am a college student I know this to be true, there are so many filler classes that you have to take to be a well rounded learner and soon to be educator for me, but man are those classes boring. I would much rather take a methods of teaching a subject course because that is what gets my skin crawling, its what gets me to go home and look further into the material. Not to mention the people I get to connect with because they share the same interests. She touches on the type of delivery we are now into, this can be taken different ways. 1. the ways we are delivering information to our students, or 2. the way they are delivering the information  they have learned. The best is option 2, it means you have or are close to reaching the highest level of thinking when it comes to the tech world. Below is the model we like to use in the ed tech department at UNI.