Social Media & Education

The internet is one of the defining inventions of our age and schools are also caught up in the maelstrom of information that has simultaneously liberated and challenged us on a fundamental level. No online resource embodies this duality better than social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, This week’s Edtechtales is appropriately offered to you via Voicethread, an online social media tool. To activate the Voicethread click on the ‘Voicetread’ button. If Voicethread gives you problems click the ‘Backup Video’ button. If you’d prefer to read, the text of this week’s entry is below. Now lets dive in.

Optimism & Reality

“Don’t worry! There’s a pile of straw down there!”

In the beginning the proponents of the internet made a promise to us all. This promise included a vision for the future where the ignorance of generations past would be banished by the light of access to the world’s combined knowledge. It was thought that ideas devoid of reason would wither and die as a second renaissance swept us towards a future where our humanity would be on par with our technology. To get a sense of how far along we’ve come towards these lofty goals in the last 20 years I invite you to check a youtube comment section or speak with someone who holds a deep seated conviction because they read about it on Facebook. Although the internet has succeeded in making life more convenient and bringing us closer together It has also uncovered and amplified some of the darker sides of humanity.

While the internet has many facets it would not be unfair characterize social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as its beating heart and that such sites echo the positive and negative aspects of the internet as a whole.

Behold! Twitter made flesh.

Social media as defined by Boyd and Eliison is

Social media can obviously be a source of positive change as seen during the Arab Spring of 2010 or the Hong Kong student protests of 2014 but its capacity for harm must never be ignored as seen in cases of cyber bullying and anti-vaccination campaigns. The question that many districts and educators believe they should answer is how social media should be approached in an educational setting.

Some would have all social media cut out of the educational environment completely as in the “walled garden” but even when successful this approach ignores the reality that social media is a part of students’ lives and schools need to educate them on its acceptable and unacceptable uses.

As of January 2016 smartinsights.com reports that:

With such worldwide prevalence the question for educators now becomes less about if and more about how we should responsibly use social media in the classroom.

The way Forward?

“Could you just be optimistic for once?!”

Before exploring the question how educators should use social media in the classroom we must acknowledge that a classroom environment functions as a sort of playground for the mind where students can explore and make mistakes without undue consequence. This aspect of the learning environment must be maintained if students are to feel comfortable taking informed risks and learning from failures. Therefore, when teachers invite social media into the classroom it becomes important for us to ask ourselves some guiding questions about the social media tool we are considering. These questions might fall into categories such as:

Control

• Do I have reasonable control over the social media tool I am using in order to maintain a positive learning environment?
• How comfortable am I with its settings, uses, and safeguards?
• What types of control do I have over the types of information shared by my students and myself?

Appropriateness

• Is the age, ability, and maturity of my students appropriate to the social media tool I am considering?
• How well do my students understand how to communicate online appropriately and effectively?
• Do the parents of my students and my administrator understand and support my use of social media?

Safety

• Am I taking appropriate measures to safeguard privacy of my students and myself?
• What is the risk factor associated with using the social media tool I am considering for both my students and myself (ie what is the worst that can happen)?
• What is the probability that my students or people outside the classroom could interfere or disrupt the learning objectives of my lesson?
• Can my students identify non productive or negative interactions and do they have the skills to extricate themselves from such situations?
• What is the relative advantage of using the social media tool I am considering verses another social media, technological, or non-technological tool to accomplish the same learning objectives?

Please note that these guidelines are original and possibly in need of discussion and update by educators themselves. If you would like to add something or question their efficacy please join the conversation in the comment section.

Whatever final form these guidelines take, its clear that confusion over social media in the classroom and what constitutes a positive and negative social media presence in the classroom is in question. Adopting some type of guidelines so that teachers can start to differentiate between sites with high relative advantage versus those with less educational applicability will become a necessary step towards sorting out the confusion.

Navigating Rough Waters

“I don’t know just steer for the center?!”

Lets take the list of criteria as they are currently proposed and apply them to two well known social networking sites. The first site will be Edmodo.com which was built from the ground up as an educational platform that combines social media functions with a classroom management system. Next, we will examine the ultra popular site Facebook which really needs no introduction.

Edmodo

Hello! I’m just happy to be here!

Edmodo is a site with high relative advantage when compared to the criteria stated above. It was purpose built for education by Jeff O’Hara and Nic Borg in 2009 who are Technology Administrators from Chicago. It currently has 65 million users as of 2015 with 300,000 schools are using it to power their classrooms. Students can collaborate, share, comment and interact with each other on desktop, laptop, or mobile devices. In addition to offering social media functionality this site also provides classroom management features such as assignments, quizzes, student planers, and other useful features. Teachers can also collaborate and find new lesson materials through Edmodo. So when compared to our criteria we can clearly see that Edmodo is highly appropriate for educational use, appropriate for a variety of age levels, and supported by many administrators and parents.

It is also worth noting that Edmodo does not require private information from students. Students can join at the invitation of their teachers using a randomly generated code. Students can only access the groups they have been invited to and students cannot be friended or contacted by anyone outside of their Edmodo group. Also, teachers maintain full control over their Edmodo groups and can delete posts, monitor activity, review student posts before they go live, or even restrict students to read-only access. Clearly Edmodo was created with safety in mind and offers teachers control which puts to rest all of our concerns under those criteria headings.

Although not a criteria heading Edmodo is admittedly not as socially relevant as other social media offerings but as we will see, using the most popular social media tools can have adverse consequences.

Facebook

Resistance is futile!

Much of educational discussion on the social media focuses on Facebook. Since Facebook is so ubiquitous (1.23 billion active users) it isn’t really necessary to go over its features but it is worth noting that it can accomplish everything Edmodo can except the classroom management functions.

While this site can be successfully used as a teaching tool and its proper usage should be covered in any tech curriculum, Facebook falls on the disadvantageous side when we compare to our criteria put forth earlier.

For example, Facebook has a privacy policy and user agreement that changes on a regular basis and has declined in 22 of 33 measures relevant to privacy on the internet according to Tech Science.org (Techscience 2016). This decline has happened despite students and parents feeling as though there content is safe.

In 2013 a study by Carnegie Mellon University found that despite improvements on the clarity of its sharing controls since 2010;

So if we examine our criteria above we can say that Facebook lacks proper privacy and content controls even when used correctly.

However, lets examine what happens when Facebook’s privacy and safety features are used incorrectly. An elementary teacher in Pinehouse Lake Saskatchewan posted a picture of a handwritten note. The note in her photo asked Facebook users to ‘like it’ in order to illustrate the consequences of misusing Facebook’s privacy settings to a student who had posted pictures of himself online without using them. One day after the initial teacher posting her photo had 70,000 likes (click HERE).

Here we can see Facebook being unintentionally misused by a student whom is arguably too young to be posting information which, as demonstrated by the teacher’s thoughtful exercise, can have far reaching consequences.

The combination of lax or ignored privacy settings and the sheer reach of Facebook could have disastrous consequences if a student accidentally or purposefully steps outside the bounds of an assignment. Lets consider a scenario where a student shares his work, another student’s work, or the entire groups’ work with people outside the lesson. Perhaps over the course of working together one student posts something offensive that in the normal classroom environment would be met with teacher disapproval and the consequence system inherent to any classroom. On Facebook such a post or unintended material could easily escape the confines of the classroom environment and take a life of its own resulting in dire consequence for both student and teacher.

Some would say that there are settings to prevent such an occurrence and that this is scenario is possible with other social media sites but sharing within Facebook is a fundamental function making the likelihood of sharing mishaps much higher and the consequences of forgetting to set up your activity correctly shouldn’t result in disproportionate consequences for students or teachers as outlined in our criteria above.

While watching a piece of student work ‘go viral’ might indeed be a fun exercise if its positive in nature it might also be career ending for the teacher and socially devastating for the student if its not. These severe consequence clearly violate the sanctity of the classroom wherein the right to fail and learn from one’s mistakes without disproportionate consequence should be protected.

Lets also not underestimate the danger of an ignorant teacher mixing up their social media account with their professional Facebook presence which can easily get a teacher fired. Again, we see that Facebook poses dire consequences not inline with our criteria.

Even if we take a positive view and explore a list of ’50 Reasons to Invite Facebook into your Classroom’ as seen on KQ ED news we can easily dismiss nearly every positives on their list by by simply saying ‘So can Edmodo’ after every plus they point out for Facebook. Lets also never forget the positives Edmodo and other purpose built social media sites for education bring to the table that Facebook simply cannot match due to the concerns already stated.

Round Up

“Your Move!”

It must be admitted that there are teachers that use Facebook to teach students and that it is huge part of today’s internet. Again, on some level this site and its proper usage must be addressed in schools but its use as a platform to carry out lesson functions cannot be recommended based on the criteria previously mentioned. All in all, the effort one needs to go through to force Facebook into an educational mould is cumbersome and fraught with serious consequences while other social media offerings designed for education take some of the guesswork out of teacher implementation and limit the reach of student work simply by being smaller players on the social media stage than Facebook.

Instead of Facebook, sites like Edmodo, Twiducate, and Wikispaces Classroom offer all the functionality of Facebook without all the danger associated with it.

Despite some misgivings, it cannot be denied that the internet is a fluid environment. Even Facebook may one day prove to be an invaluable teaching tool. Although many of the promises made at the dawn of the internet age have yet to materialize it cannot be a bad thing for human beings to have access to knowledge and to communicate with each other. History has shown that it is during these times when humanity has thrived and educational institutions in the 21st century can and should help humanity realize the promises of our digital age through the thoughtful use of social media.