Welcome to week 7!
This weeks class was interesting in that we discussed a flipped classroom. While this might sound quite Feng Shui, it really has little to do with classroom arrangement and everything to do with flipping the instructional sequence. Why not assign the instructional portion of your class for homework and use class time for hands-on assignments? Sounds great!
The problem comes in the implementation. In the experiences I have in my current teaching assignment, only about 30-40% of student complete their homework on an average night (that may be generous, but hey, I'm the social studies teacher and not the math teacher). There are also other difficulties with technology at this point. Many of my students don't have available technology at home and as such, couldn't access the lessons from a podcast or other web based media site.
Bottom line, at present, the flipped classroom wouldn't be feasible in my current teaching assignment. In the future, if all students had a netbook, ipad or other tablet device, I see promise!

Part 2: Social media
Let me start out by saying I am not the most creative person in my marriage, more less my school. I learn by seeing and doing. So, the only things I have experienced using social media in the classroom was a teacher that tweeted his class topics and assignments daily. This works well, but the communication is only one way. Email is currently the media format of choice for communication other than phone and face to face communication.
I am torn about how much social media I want to use in my classroom. The reason being is I want to be unavailable from 4:00 pm until 7:00 am the next day. With social media, sometimes it is difficult to ignore it or turn it off. Facebook, twitter and other social media alerts on our smart phones make it difficult to block it all out and have time with your family.

Have a great week!