connectED

I had an opportunity to participate in a panel discussion about the impact of social media in education this morning on the campus of the University of Michigan at Flint. Students in their graduate program for Educational Leadership met this morning to discuss how social media has changed professional development for educators.  And, Saturday mornings are the perfect morning to discuss this!  I got to mention how awesome #satchat has been for growing my PLN and exposing me to new and innovative ideas in education.

I also was excited to share how I use social media to amplify my students' voices and connect them to other thinkers around the world. Our world has been flattened by technology.

But this is old news.

Instead, I was surprised to hear about the level of push-back that these future administrators faced. Many of the educators in the room spoke about their districts having strict policies against connecting with parents online.  Connecting with students online was out of the question, as the districts they currently worked in had clear board policies against using social media in the classroom even at the secondary level.

Perhaps it is because I have immersed myself in technology and love sharing how social media has connected my learners with authors, experts, real readers, and classrooms around the globe that I forget that there still exists fear about how young people are using connective technologies.  I am not naive. I know that students need to be taught digital responsibility and that irresponsible behavior online can have dire real-life consequences, but locking the box on social media is not doing anyone any good.  How can we teach digital responsibility if we do not allow our educators and students to access it?

I hope that I was able to share today ways in which social media has helped make the walls of our classroom more transparent. I loved sharing some of what I have learned from Joe Sanfelippo (he's actually in town on Monday for MACUL's Mindshare!) and Tony Sinanis's work: "As lead learners, administrators, and educators, it is our responsibility to transform the thick brick barriers surrounding our school buildings into clear, transparent walls of glass." Social media helps teachers and administrators connect with our most important stakeholders.  It also helps us clearly articulate our story. The story of our schools.

Connecting Readers

The excitement over our March Book Madness bracket is growing.  This past week as our school community voted on books in the initial bracket, I had the pleasure of handing out signed copies of Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park and Patricia McCormick's Sold along with gift certificates to local book stores and copies of Looking for Alaska and Thirteen Reasons Why.

And not only have students been getting into our daily voting, but teachers have as well. On Tuesday, I drew the name of a fellow English teacher as the winner of our raffle from all those who participated in the day's voting. She was giddy as I handed her a copy of Thirteen Reasons Why. 

But yesterday afternoon, the excitement started to really gain momentum. And it all started with an email. From LOIS LOWRY!  Oh yes, you read that right. Prior to the start of our voting, I emailed every author in our bracket, explaining our March Book Madness bracket and requesting a signed copy of their book to give away. It is how we received copies of Rainbow Rowell's and Patricia McCormick's books.  Well, I also emailed Lois Lowry, author of The Giver, a clear favorite among both our students and teachers.  So when I saw that email signed "LL" in my inbox, stating that Lois Lowry was sending a signed copy of The Giver, well I couldn't keep that to myself! 

I've been using Celly, a text-messaging service, to conduct our daily votes. When I saw Ms. Lowry's email, I shot out a quick text to all our bracket voters sharing the news. Within minutes, I had teachers and students coming up to excitedly chat about their love of The Giver. And then, just a few minutes later, S.E. Hinton retweeted us! I had sent out a tweet earlier in the day from my class account sharing our daily vote between Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night and S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. And she retweeted it. By the last bell of the day, I had lost count of the number of students and staff that approached me excited, nearly giddy, wanting to talk about their love of these authors and their books. 

That bring us to today...

I'm sitting in the teachers' workroom typing up my Writer's Notebook prompt for my last block of the day, Creative Writing, when my phone buzzes that short zap. Someone has just tweeted me.  I turn in over and find...JOHN GREEN HAS TWEETED ME!  Not a retweet, mind you. He has directly tweeted my classroom Twitter account to put in a vote for today's March Book Madness battle which pits his Fault in our Stars against Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, our closest battle to date. I believe I squealed and that shouted, "Holy crap!"

Now this is not normal, every day behavior in our teachers' workroom. The English teacher sitting next to me at the large table in the middle of our workroom just stared at me when I could barely stammer out why I was so excited.  I handed her my phone to show her the tweet. And she laughed before clicking a quick photo of my phone to post to Instagram. I quickly retweeted and sent out a message to our student and teacher voters through Celly letting them know about the day's connection. We were giddy! It didn't take long for the buzz to spread. Not thirty minutes later when I walked through the lunchroom for cafeteria duty, a student called out from the din of conversation, "Ms. Ward - I just saw! John Green?! That is sooooo cool!" 

I love that we had an opportunity to connect with author John Green using social media (on Digital Learning Day, too), but here's the best part: students and teachers are giddy talking about books! These connections have sparked an interest in our community. We're talking about books, making reading recommendations, arguing the merits of one book over another. We are excited, engaged, and connected readers! 

Now, I wonder who we'll hear from next? Veronica Roth? J.K. Rowling? ;)

Share Alike

With two young boys, it is the word that I find myself repeating (sometimes shouting) more times than I can count each day - share!  It is one of the most important lessons that as parents we hope that our children learn early and practice often throughout their lives. It is also the lesson that as teachers, whether you work with kindergarteners or university students, you hope your students have retained.  Share your thinking. Share your reflections. Share your mistakes. Share your resources. Share. So as I have been putting together my lesson plans for my PA Writing and Literature Project course next week on Writing with 2.0 Technologies, I have been thinking about the best ways not only to share the my resources, but also how to engage other teachers in thinking about how we share resources and information with our students.

Below you will find a LiveBinder of resources that I put together to help introduce teachers not simply to online bookmarking, but to how sites like LiveBinders, Evernote, and others can be used to collaborate with students. Online bookmarking sites are fantastic tools for curating information with students, not simply for them.  

Take a peek!  I would love your feedback.

Photo by Carlos Maya

What Teachers (and Students) Should Know About Facebook Privacy Settings

Did you know that a Google search can pull up photos you post to Facebook? Did you know that college admissions offices are now using services like Pipl to see what potential candidates are posting to social networking sites? Below are links to number of blog posts and websites that go into more detail about what both teachers and students should know when it comes to Facebook's privacy settings. Are you protecting yourself, your images, and your content? You should be.

• Beyond Social Networking: Building Toward Learning Communities -- THE Journal

  Web 2.0 tools have critically elevated the social networking activity and skills of individuals. Not only are young people highly active in social networks, but older individuals are also showing a huge increase in their use of these tools. The attraction of older age groups is, of course, social connection and community building among professional and casual peers and friends.

• FACEBOOK FAIL: How to Use Facebook Privacy Settings and Avoid Disaster

  The beauty of Facebook’s many features is that now you can choose what you show and to what type of people. By using friend lists and playing with your privacy settings, you can create different views for each segment of your life.

• Langwitches » Teacher Code of Conduct… Revisited

  I am wondering if there is a necessity to create a guideline or code of conduct how teachers are to present themselves in their private online network places profiles? Does the administration at school or the district have the right (duty) to bring the subject up for discussion and in the end to make rules? Is it their business or not?

• Facebook in the Classroom

  A good PDF resource for teachers on how to use Facebook with students.

• Facebook Strategies For The Classroom

  This presentation explores the potential uses of Facebook for teaching and motivating collaboration between students. Issues of privacy and intellectual property will also be covered, as well as advantages and pitfalls of social networks.

• Facebook Privacy for Teachers « Megan Golding

  I’m a Facebook user AND a teacher. Here’s how I locked down my profile so that I can have a social life and not worry that the world is watching over my shoulder.

• 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

  All Facebook users should know this.

  
  
• NetSmartz Workshop | Facebook

  A good place to start for talking with students and staff about privacy issues on social networking sites like Facebook.

Workin' the Web: Social Networking in School

Facebook, Wikipages, and Nings…oh my! We know our students use these technologies outside our classrooms, but how might such social networking platforms be used to promote critical literacy skills inside our classrooms? Can Web 2.0 technologies help students learn to interpret, question, summarize, evaluate, and synthesize their worlds? With multiple studies suggesting teens are more apt to pick up a laptop than a paperback, it is imperative that educators find ways to bridge the gap between traditional and digital texts. Instead of blocking and banning Internet use from our schools, twenty-first century teachers must learn to embrace this new frontier of reading. This means teaching our students to be critical readers and consumers of media. In reality, this is no different from the skills that we have been teaching our students for decades. It is not a change in content; it is merely a change in where and how we apply the skills of critical literacy. Practically speaking, this means that English teachers must broaden our definition of what constitutes a “text.” By utilizing social networking platforms to engage our students, we will help students become more competent readers in the world in which they already dwell—the world of Web 2.0.

Education writers and bloggers David Warlick, Will Richardson, and many others see Web 2.0 technologies as transformative, a way to encourage students to be not only consumers of their education but creators as well. Students use wikipages to summarize, question, and create knowledge. They use Facebook and Nings to interact with learners in other classrooms, other cities, other states, even other countries. Social networking sites have the potential of connecting students to learners in ways that we could not have imagined just a decade earlier.

According to David Warlick, social networking includes:

• the process of initiating, developing and maintaining friendships and collegial or professional relationships for mutual benefit. Current discussions surrounding social networking deal with web-based or technology-mediated tools, interactions, and related phenomena, but social networking occurs in many forms, including face to face.
• person-to-person exchanges that can be classified as question and answer, point and counterpoint, announcement and support.
• technologies that facilitate social networking tend to emphasize ease of use, spontaneity, personalization, exchange of contacts, and low-end voyeurism.Some technologies that are often considered social networking technologies may not be socially oriented in and of themselves, but the communities that form around such technologies often demonstrate key elements of social networking (for example, the discussion communities that form around collaboratively authored wiki content).

POPULAR SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES:

• Wiki Pages - Sites like PB Wiki and Wikispaces offer free pages where users can collaborate to create content online. These sites are offer students a place to demonstrate knowledge, interact with other learners, and create a product for an audience outside the walls of their classroom.
• Ning - A Ning is a platform that connects invited users to interact with one another through discussion boards, personal spaces, video links, and more. A central administrator oversees who is allowed to join the site, the types of posts made, and design of the site.
• Facebook - Facebook has replaced MySpace in popularity. Facebook is a site that allows users to "friend" one another, post updates, play games, upload photos, create and join groups, upload videos, and comment on others content. Users have control over who is allowed to see their content. Check out this presentation on using Facebook in the classroom.
• LinkedIn - Unlike Facebook which was originally started as a way for university students to connect with one another, LinkedIn is a networking site meant for professionals. There are LinkedIn networks for accountants, teachers, psychologists, and more.
• Twitter - Users are limited to 140 character posts. Users "friend" one another in order to follow the updates of a particular Twitter user. Each update is called a tweet. Innovators of Twitter have used this application to inform their network of friends of interesting content on the web and to create "Twitter Stories."
• Voice Thread - This is an application that allows users to upload images, presentation slides, or videos, record narration for them, and post them to share. It is a social networking site in that it also allows other users to also comment on the uploaded presentation. There is even a specific section of this site with added security for teachers and students called Ed.VoiceThread. Check out this example of a teacher's Voice Thread site.

WHAT ARE THE CONCERNS WITH USING SOCIAL NETWORKS IN SCHOOLS?

• "Schools and Online Social Networking" - Nancy Willard discusses the potential problems of allowing access to social networking sites in schools. Her article on Education World is a good start for exploring these issues.
• "What Kids Learn in Virtual Worlds" by Stephanie Olsen for CNET News

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF USING SOCIAL NETWORKS IN SCHOOLS?

• "Get a Life: Students Collaborate in Simulated Roles” by Laila Weir for Edutopia elaborates on the challenges and successes with online social communities for students.
• "How To: Use Social-Networking Technology for Learning" by Fan Smith at Edutopia explains how schools might embrace social networks.

HOW CAN EDUCATORS USE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES IN THE CLASSROOM?

• Students from different classes create a Facebook group on women in Afghanistan
  Students connect with others from Australia, France, India, and Minnesota on the issue of helping former child soldiers in Liberia
• Use ePals to connect your students with a classroom in another part of the country or the world
• VoiceThread can be used to teach math concepts
• Students use Facebook and MySpace to raise awareness about social issues
• Middle school science students use a Ning to stay connected
• Check out how this high school English teacher is using a Ning to help her students discuss Frankenstein

RESOURCES:

• SocialNetworking4Teachers - David Warlick had assembled a wonderful wiki all about how social networking can work for students and educators alike.
• Classroom 2.0 is a Ning website for educators. This site helps to connect teachers around issues of technology.
• The English Companion Ning was created by author and teacher Jim Burke. It is a wonderful resource for content specific lessons as well as ideas on how to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies into the classroom.
• Use Twitter to build your Personal Learning Network (PLN). Check out this post for ideas on how teachers can use Twitter to find curricular resources.
• This is good information about how to protect you and tour students when using Facebook in class.