Currently where I am located, students to do not have access to social media networks like facebook and twitter, and snapchat when using the school’s wifi network. Sad to say, this is not the case  when most students all have a smart phone with a data plan that can allow them to access any website.  From what I have seen of students use in social media in the classroom is just a hinderance to instructional time.  All students want to do is take pictures and snap people during classtime, instead of using the technology for educational purposes.

One thing that I do think that social media can lend itself  well to, would to have students to start to think critically and analyze all things that the read online with skeptism. There are so many false posts everyday on social media networks that are either not true, or have inaccuracies with them. Yes, facebook could be a good starting point to help conduct more research on a particular topic of interest, but it is not the all know. I mean how many people fall for the so-and-so died, but they are not really dead. Or that certain shows have been cancelled, when they really have not. This would be the only positive thing that I could really say about social media in the classroom.

I do think that edmodo, does lend it self well as to trying to attract and entice students into thinking that learning is more like a social media experience rather than learning. I do not think that I would classify edmodo though as social media, i feel that this site is sort of like the classroom bulletin board that everyone enrolled can post on.

During the process of writing my lesson plan, I did not experience many challenges. One of the toughest things for me, was finding the right supplemental material to use in the lesson plan. My goal with the lesson would be to encourage students to read and analyze graphs about Global Warming. There is so much material and graphs on the internet today, that trying to narrow it down was a little bit tough.

Overall, I feel that the writing the lesson plan is coming together and will hopefully yield a good result.

During my experiences working at NC State this summer with the ASSIST team, I discovered many engaging activities and videos that were shared with everyone to help connect students to understanding what nanotechnology is and how much of an impact nano-tech is to their everyday lives. Without this really small scale chips and electronic boards, they would not have a super fast and powerful smart phone.

Also, during this summer experience Dr. Jones and Dr. Jurr invited Carolina Biological out to do a short workshop.  There were two main activities that I  would love to come back and do in my classroom with students. The first being the Write It, Do It challenge. Students build a sculpture and then write detailed directions of how they built the design. After about 20 minutes, everyone was to switch their directions and then try to build the design of someone else based on their directions. This would enable me to stress the importance of being very detailed oriented, in ordered to have a good repeatable experiment. Next, I can tie this into the research scientists I meet at the externship site, and discuss some of the cutting edge research that is happening at NC State.

Also, from this experience I would hope to eventually have my mentors come out and talk to the students about what they do for a living, and how they got to where they are today. I would hope that possibly , this could help encourage some of my students to go into an engineering or STEM career field.