Pros and Cons of Using Social Media in Your School

THE Journal’s article Keeping It Clean by John K. Waters, provides excellent information about sites like Facebook and MySpace and their use in schools. Could someone put up a fake social media page and make it look like it is your school’s official page? Yes, says an administrator at Blaine High School in Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota, who adds that the person who did it has yet to be identified. The page seemed harmless at first, but then caused problems. Anoka-Hennepin decided that the best thing to do was to establish an official district page with individual pages for each school. The pages target parents, teachers, and administrators and are not pages for students to interact with school personnel or each other. In the Palo Alto Unified School District in California, students use social networking to learn about school events and to access teacher pages. Palo Alto installed LinkExtend, which includes KidSafe and ways to alert users about problem links. Some educators, like Matt Levinson (From Fear to Facebook: One School’s Journey) suggest that Facebook should follow Google’s example and provide a place that “teachers and students could use ... as a teaching and learning tool securely.” That’s what Edmodo does. It’s a free network that doesn’t require students to give private information. Teachers sign up for it and interaction is directed by teachers.

What Do Kids Want For Christmas? Tech!

It’s difficult to keep up with all the tech innovations and gadgets, but when British children ages 5 -16 were asked what they wanted for Christmas, even the younger ones seemed to know what they could do with tech devices they wanted.—And it was digital gadgets, not toys that were tops on the lists. Of the 2,138 children in the survey, 39% wanted Apple gadgets with iPhone 4 leading the survey with 14%, iPod Touch, 13%; and iPad, 12%. These selections were followed by Kinect for Xbox, 6%, Zhu, Zhu Pet Hamsters/Kung Zhu Hampsters, 5%; Flip Video Camera, 4%, Toy Story 3 Jet Pack Buzz Lightyear, 4%; PlayStation Move, 4%, Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 Game, 3%; and Barbie Video Girls, 3%. Seventeen percent of the 5-8 year-olds preferred Apple gadgets, as did 50% of the 9-12-year olds, and 66% of the 13-16 year-olds. What’s happened to dolls and footballs and books? When considering this trend in what children want and may receive as presents, we should be thinking about how we can put the devices the children already have to work for learning in classrooms and at home, and we should be focusing upon helping our children learn to use these technologies appropriately.

Illegal Downloading

In the wake of the media’s recognition, there also seems to be some revisiting of the issue of illegal downloading as well. So much of all these behaviors are what parent’s model. Be nice and chances your kids will be nice. Don’t take advantage of the system and copy or plagiarize and chances are your kids won’t either. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to discuss the temptations or why it is wrong or even why despite the pain or expense, you just have to do the right thing.  As my daughter once said to me when she was about six when I told her that it was just as easy to be nice as nasty, she said “You always say that Mom, but sometimes it just isn’t true.” She’s right, and that’s why we all have to watch ourselves. If you haven’t talked about the issues or illegal downloads or plagiarism with your kids lately, you might want to take a look at this article on illegal downloading. It’s still a crime despite the fact, as the kids would say, that “everyone is doing it.”

Homework As An Excuse

Most kids like to spend time online, and many parents and teachers worry about the time students spend at the keyboard. As teachers move to assigning homework that may require use of the Internet to access and complete assignments, kids have a perfect excuse for staying online. All they have to do is to tell you is, “I’m doing my homework,” when perhaps they’ve finished what was required an hour or so ago. This is just another way kids are finding to circumvent what we want them to do. The answer is parent and teacher communication so parents will be aware of assignments and teachers will be aware of how long students are taking to “do assignments” at home. Parents need to learn how to monitor their children’s online activities and how to find out what’s actually assigned.