Tag Archives: Social Media

Instead of Banning, NYC Provides Social Media Guidelines

Lisa Nielsen writes that New York City has reached out to students, teachers and parents with social media guidelines.

According to the NYC DOE website, the guidelines are necessary because, “In an increasingly digital world, we seek to offer our students the opportunities that multi-media learning can provide, which is why we allow and encourage the appropriate use of these powerful resources. As we challenge our students with new methods of learning, we continue to ensure that these tools are used responsibly, and enrich the learning environment in our schools.”

And

This work is taken seriously. These guidelines aren’t just published and placed on a website in hopes that someone will read them. The NYC DOE provides professional development to staff interested in incorporating these guidelines into teaching and learning with classes such as “Using social media to increase teacher effectiveness,” “Supporting the common core with social media,” and “A Common Sense approach to prevent cyberbullying.”

More in the article including links the the NYC resources.

 

Social Media for School Leaders

I just returned from the national middle school conference (AMLE12) in Portland, OR.

While there, I attended a wonderful session on Social Media for School Leaders by Howard Johnston and Ron Williamson. Their presentation showed a wonderful balance of the realities of today's viral communication and the school context.

The presentation addressed the role of social media in five areas:

  1. Social Media and Schools
  2. School Safety and Crisis Management
  3. Communication
  4. Productivity
  5. Professional Growth

What they made clear is how important a tool social media is to schools and school leaders, and the enormous opportunity lost when schools shun social media. They raised the following questions suggesting why school leaders might want to pay attention to the potential of social media:

  • Do you communicate with students, families and staff?
  • Do you monitor community views about your school?
  • Do your kids use social media?
  • Do you need to stay on top of cutting-edge educational topics?
  • Do you need to promote good news about your school in the community?

And they recommended a 5-step plan (in part, based on findings from the Pew Internet and American Life Project) related to social media and school safety:

  1. Learn about social media and how it works
  2. Recognize that most teens use it responsibly
  3. Don’t attempt to ban it
  4. Help students, families and staff know about how to manage social media
  5. Focus on responsible student use

Johnston and Williamson provided a great list of resources available to school leaders:

 

Supervision – Social Media Study Group

Note: This is one in a series of blog posts to be used by Auburn’s Social Media Design Team to conduct a study group before making recommendations for social media policy. If unfamiliar with this series, you might find reading this post helpful.

Supervision Study Questions

  • What are Auburn schools current doing related to supervision when students are using technology?
  • What are manual and technical approaches to supervision and setting limits?
  • What is considered best practice around supervision of technology use?

 

Although intended as a tool for Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, everyone is invited to use these posts as a resource. And if you are not a member of Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, you are welcome to post comments, too. But please limit/be thoughtful of the sharing of opinion and stay focused on the focus questions – we a trying to use these posts for fact-finding, identifying resources, identifying best practice, etc. Thanks!

 

Educating for Appropriate Use – Social Media Study Group

Note: This is one in a series of blog posts to be used by Auburn’s Social Media Design Team to conduct a study group before making recommendations for social media policy. If unfamiliar with this series, you might find reading this post helpful.

Education for Digital Citizenship Study Questions

  • What are Auburn schools current doing related to Digital Citizenship (both for students and adults)?
  • What is considered best practice around teaching digital citizenship?

Although intended as a tool for Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, everyone is invited to use these posts as a resource. And if you are not a member of Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, you are welcome to post comments, too. But please limit/be thoughtful of the sharing of opinion and stay focused on the focus questions – we a trying to use these posts for fact-finding, identifying resources, identifying best practice, etc. Thanks!

 

Impact of Social Media – Social Media Study Group

Note: This is one in a series of blog posts to be used by Auburn’s Social Media Design Team to conduct a study group before making recommendations for social media policy. If unfamiliar with this series, you might find reading this post helpful.

Impact of Social Media Study Questions

  • How many social media-related discipline issues have been logged?
  • Of the logged social media-related discipline issues, what percent were about being distracted, what percent were about bullying, and what percent were about something else (and what was that)?
  • What are the reasons we would not want access to social media at school?
  • What are the reasons we would want social media at school?

Although intended as a tool for Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, everyone is invited to use these posts as a resource. And if you are not a member of Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, you are welcome to post comments, too. But please limit/be thoughtful of the sharing of opinion and stay focused on the focus questions – we a trying to use these posts for fact-finding, identifying resources, identifying best practice, etc. Thanks!

 

 

 

 

Banning & Blocking – Social Media Study Group

Note: This is one in a series of blog posts to be used by Auburn’s Social Media Design Team to conduct a study group before making recommendations for social media policy. If unfamiliar with this series, you might find reading this post helpful.

Banning/Filtering Study Questions

  • What is the impact of blocking Facebook?
  • What methods of blocking are available to us and what are the untended consequences of each?
  • How easy is it to circumvent any filtering?
  • What is considered best practice around filtering?

 

Although intended as a tool for Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, everyone is invited to use these posts as a resource. And if you are not a member of Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, you are welcome to post comments, too. But please limit/be thoughtful of the sharing of opinion and stay focused on the focus questions – we a trying to use these posts for fact-finding, identifying resources, identifying best practice, etc. Thanks!

 

 

 

Auburn’s Social Media Design Team

Auburn has long had a pretty progressive social media policy. We didn’t block Facebook or Twitter, even thought nearly all the districts around us do. As you can imagine, it was pretty controversial, but it was based on the idea that effective communication through social media has become a job skill, that there are appropriate (even academic) uses for social media, and that we needed to teach young people appropriate use.

So, if leaving social media open was half of the approach, we certainly were struggling with the other half: teaching staff how to teach with it, figuring out how to integrate digital citizenship training, etc., etc.

Then, over the last 6 weeks or so, we had a couple high impact instances of bullying. Facebook was involved with both. One big one was student to student, but we also had one student to teacher.

It was time to do something.

So we blocked Facebook.

But the real problem is bullying, not Facebook.

So we put together a K-12 Social Media Design Team that will work as a study group, explore specific questions, do some fact finding, check in with parents, students, and educators for their perspective, and then make recommendations for social media policy.

So Facebook will remain blocked for now. But we’re going to collaborate toward a much more reasoned response.

We’re building our work around the lessons learned by veteran technology-using educators. When technology is viewed as a problem, blocking and banning (by itself) is usually not the answer. The answer usually is a combination four strategies:

The next couple blog posts (linked above) are going to be for the Social Media Design Team. We’re going to use them as a tool for collecting our evidence and resources. They will add these resources, ideas, data, etc., as comments to the posts.

Everyone is invited to use these posts as a resource. And if you are not a member of Auburn’s Social Media Design Team, you are welcome to post comments, too. But please limit/be thoughtful of the sharing of opinion and stay focused on the focus questions – we a trying to use these posts for fact-finding, identifying resources, identifying best practice, etc. Thanks!