SocialText

It was very interesting to hear Eugene Lee, CEO of SocialText talking about how social software is changing the way we interact with each other and how it enables more communication where we can continue a conversation without being face to face or voice to voice.

It was also good to see how the various types of social software are being put together into an enterprise package: SocialText. For a very long time, many adults look down at the social software, thinking they are just toys that take away students time for nonsense communications. I, myself, at one point, also feel this way about some of them. The only thing is, being a high school teacher, I am open to experiment with all these software so I am in touch with my students. I start to see some value in some of them. The only thing I want to do right now is to see how these software can be applied to increase student-teacher interaction in a productive way.

Some ideas:
- Twitter: I can use it to solicit student response, using the Chinese language. I already found out that Twitter takes Chinese if I use the web to input. So now I need to get the students on Twitter. The next problem to tackle is reading and typing Chinese on their phones.
- Wiki: collaboration for cultural projects and chapter reviews.

hopefully more to come...