School Prayer Mininstry Example

If you are looking for an example of how technology might be used for a prayer ministry for a school, check out this page from the Colorado Lutheran High School Association. Your school prayer model could be based upon a model like this or enhanced by using Facebook, Twitter, email lists, text messages, or other technology tools.

What does your school do to engage your community in prayer on behalf of your shared ministry? Share your ideas as a comment to this post.

Following Breaking News

Today's news has been dominated by the horrific bombing in Oslo, Norway. When following an event such as this, the articles in tomorrow's newspaper will be dated news compared with the immediacy of following the story through the Internet. Here are some ways you can have your students follow a breaking news event in your classroom:

• Follow posts on Twitter using hashtags. Hashtags are an internal categorization of content around keywords. Popular hashtags for following the aftermath of the bombing are #oslo, #utoya, and #oslobomb.
• Follow a Wikipedia page created for an event. A 2011 Oslo Attacks page was created almost immediately after the initial bomb blast. So many users were passionate about sharing links and updates via Wikipedia that the page was updated nearly 40 times an hour at the height of activity.
• Within minutes of the initial bomb blast photos of the destruction, such as this one, were uploaded to Flickr, a photo sharing site. In today's world, anyone with a cell phone camera can be a photojournalist, and many are anxious to share what they see.
• Mashable, an online site which monitors technology news, see social media tools, especially Google+, as a site for disseminating timely information about a current event (see this article). While Google+ is not widely available, new tools regularly emerge for gathering information and engaging others in the world in conversations.

If school had been in session today, I would have had the challenge of deciding whether to follow the Oslo story with my class or whether to procede with my regular lesson plans. I don't know what I would have decided, but it is incredible to know that the resources are available to track current events nearly real time. Sometimes, that is the better use of class time.

What I've Learned on Twitter This Month

Twitter has become my number one professional development tool. I can view new sites, resources, research, etc. with just a quick 5-10 look through the posts of those I follow. Here are four posts that led me to new learning on Twitter this month:

• 7 Virtual Field Trips Every Teacher Ought to Know About -- shared by @espanateacher, an excellent Lutheran educator from Arizona.
• Is Lecture Really Bad? -- a thought provoking blog post by Dr. Bernard Bull, Associate Professor of Education at Concordia University Wisconsin.
• Google Apps Learning Center -- resources for those of us who use Google Apps in our schools.
• Designing Tomorrow's Schools -- video resource shared by @alhelmy, an excellent Lutheran educator from Missouri.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter at @dawblack and join our learning community.

What have you learned on Twitter recently? Be sure to share your new learning as a comment to this post.