Social Media and Wisconsin Politics

As we talk about the use of social media in class, there are real world examples of its use in Wisconsin politics today. The Daily PAge (from the Isthmus weekly paper) offers a guide to social media campaigns against the governor's current agenda (http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=32233). This is just one side of the issue. I'm sure there are resources presenting the opposing viewpoint, too. Channel 3000 also provides an overview of social media on the protests.  Think about how resources like this could be used to analyze the current situation and different viewpoints with students. As an example of the traffic, check out the Social Meteor tracking of tweets for the first week.

You may also find the PBS lesson plan on Social Media and Non-Violent Protest useful this week.

Keeping track of all your tools

There are so many tools that can be used to connect with others on the web. As you begin to find and then narrow down the ones that you follow over time, you might want to look at some of the personalized start pages like iGoogle, NetVibes and PageFlakes to pull it all together in one place. I personally use iGoogle, but NetVibes has a nice feature that you can make a public page for others to see. This would allow you to create a personal page for your things and a public one either for teacher resources or for student resources. You can add different tabs for different types of users. I haven't used PageFlakes, but I have heard of librarians using it to create subject pages for their schools.