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Video about Using Social Media in the Classroom

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Video about Using Social Media in the Classroom

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I'm a student voice advocate. Fortunately, my employer supports this and as such, we have been incorporating the voice of students in the guidelines around social media (You can see the teen guidelines at schools.nyc.gov/socialmedia). Most recently I had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of elementary students about social media and which platforms they are using. Admittedly, I'm not much of a user of social media platforms for the under 13 set, so I knew I had a lot to learn. Interestingly, across the board, one platform rose to the top and I had never heard of it before.

The platform is called MovieStar Planet and it promises players "Fame, Fortune, and Friends." Interestingly, though not surprisingly, the first reaction from many of the adults about this game was negative. Online gaming? Social media? Fame, fortune, friends = narcissism. Blech.

When I suggested this would be a great game to be reviewed on an education site, I was told, the site only reviews games that were educational. For some it seems if kids like it and it plays to their need for attention, it has to be bad.

Not so.
Here is how MovieStar Planet describes their site:
"MovieStarPlanet is a social website where children and teenagers work together with their friends to create cartoons. MovieStarPlanet is a blend of Facebook and YouTube with a learning dimension added."
Here's how it works:
In MovieStarPlanet you get a personal virtual MovieStar which is used in movies, chat rooms and games.

In the Movies and chat rooms a microphone can be used to record speechlines and voice chat - please see the "How to record sound" instruction movie for details about how to record sound.

Your MovieStar earns fame points and StarCoins (the virtual money in MovieStarPlanet) when you participate in the MovieStarPlanet virtual world.

StarCoins are earned when other users watch your published movies, when you watch and rate other movies, and when you play games in the chat rooms.

Fame points are earned when other users watch your published movies.

Your MovieStar starts at level 0, and when you earn fame points you rise in levels. New levels give access to new animations and access to chat rooms reserved for MovieStars at higher levels.

So you might be reading this and be a bit freaked out that young people are being social online. What if someone says something mean? What if someone is not who they say they are?

Real concerns indeed which is why it is important for adults to be in the online worlds of young people. That said, when I talked to the students, they could have given a class on the topic. They definitely knew how to handle it.

the person nicely that you don't like what they are saying.
-If they continue block and report them.

That usually did the trick. If not, they say they'd get a parent or teacher that wouldn't "freak out and ban it" involved. And, that's a real concern for kids. Too often one negative thing happens and the response from adults is to ban and block ( like this school did) rather than empower and prepare our youth who are growing up in a world where being savvy on social media in crucial.

Think about it this way. What better way for children to develop literacy skills then to chat with each and create movies for a real audience. And, bonus. The children have the opportunity to connect with others from around the world.
Now check out who is behind the creation of MovieStar Planet:
The Danish Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation in cooperation with The Danish University of Education, and a number of elementary school teachers. In 2009-11 the development of MovieStarPlanet is part of the research and development project about the use of games in education called Serious Games on a Global Market Place
Here are the education objectives:
The cartoons in MovieStarPlanet are small and very simple, focusing on using English in new and motivating ways. The cartoon medium is used to practice the written English skills of the children allowing them to:

►read and write screenplays
► watch their own and other children's Movies so that they practice listening to and understanding/interpreting the English language

For the children, MovieStarPlanet is ideal for:

►participating in "language games" and role-plays
►using digital media to create simple or more advanced texts
►communicating with children in other grades and schools
►understanding and performing simple or more advance language actions
► using digital media for creative expression
Ready to get started?
►Teachers: Head on over to the teacher's center.
►Students: www.moviestarplanet.com is freely available on the internet and can be freely used in education or privately by anyone.
►Parents: Read http://info.moviestarplanet.com/parents.aspx.
►Everyone: Safety first. Read this: http://info.moviestarplanet.com/safety.aspx
Lisa Nielsen writes for and speaks to audiences across the globe about learning innovatively and is frequently covered by local and national media for her views on "Passion (not data) Driven Learning," "Thinking Outside the Ban" to harness the power of technology for learning, and using the power of social media to provide a voice to educators and students. Ms. Nielsen has worked for more than a decade in various capacities to support learning in real and innovative ways that will prepare students for success. In addition to her award-winning blog, The Innovative Educator, Ms. Nielsen's writing is featured in places such as Huffington Post, Tech & Learning, ISTE Connects, ASCD Wholechild, MindShift, Leading & Learning, The Unplugged Mom, and is the author the book Teaching Generation Text. Disclaimer: The information shared here is strictly that of the author and does not reflect the opinions or endorsement of her employer.

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The Social Media Game Elementary School Students Should Be Playing

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I'm a student voice advocate. Fortunately, my employer supports this and as such, we have been incorporating the voice of students in the guidelines around social media (You can see the teen guidelines at schools.nyc.gov/socialmedia). Most recently I had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of elementary students about social media and which platforms they are using.

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Image credit: Shutterstock

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Are today's students tweeting their way to better grades? More than nine out of 10 teenagers hold at least one social media account; Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Vine, Twitter and Facebook rule the lives of most middle and high school students. And while much attention has been paid to the negative effects of social media, including cyber bullying, there could be a positive upside, too.
Related: What You Can Learn From 8 Kids Already Making a Million Dollars
From elementary school to college, social media is empowering students, parents and teachers to share information in new ways and build a new sense of community. And students are using social media to do more than just share tips to ace the next exam: They're turning to Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat to share success stories for student-loan payoffs, find summer internships and collaborate on projects with students across the country.

Are classrooms next?

Given the above statistics, schools don't need to convince students of the value of social media; they've already been won over. Today's teens are already collaborating and connecting with other teens outside school via social media; and now, some educators are pushing to make this collaboration happen inside school walls, too.

On the most practical level, integrating social media into day-to-day learning makes sense. Why not talk to teens in the online world where they already spend most of their time inhabiting?

Walk down the hall of any school, and today's teens are fully absorbed in their smartphones, checking their Instagram feeds, sharing photos and sending Snapchat messages. How can teachers reach this world?

Learning management systems like Blackboard and Moodle have been involved in online learning for more than a decade. Now, public and private schools alike are taking the first steps to embrace social media in the classroom.

As Katie Benmar, then a high school freshman, wrote last April in an Education Week op-ed, "The best teachers I've ever had have used technology to enhance learning, including using Facebook pages for upcoming projects or planned online chats about books we read in class."

Benmar made a fair point: A book report follows a standard format; so, an online discussion about books is an opportunity to break this format by setting up students to listen and respond to other people's opinions, with textual evidence.
Related: Bro Code: Teenage 'Treps Amer And Mohamed Yaghi
Teachers are listening. An AP biology teacher at New Milford High School in Bergen County, NJ, recently challenged his students to discuss the stages of meiosis on Twitter, using a shared hashtag; the creative challenge for students was to be succinct enough to describe each stage in 140 characters or less, writes T.H.E. Journal.

"As a digital marketing professor at the Catholic University of Cordoba, Carla Dawson finds it a requirement nowadays to use social media tools to connect with her students and get them motivated to do the tasks at hand. "We live in a digital ecosystem, and it is vital that educational institutions adapt," says Dawson, who as an international speaker runs her own agency.

Building a stronger school community

Social media integration doesn't have to stop with teens and teachers; increasingly, administrators are finding new, creative ways to integrate social media into their schools. Today's parents of younger students are often social media natives; some even had Facebook in college when it first debuted. They use LinkedIn to find jobs. And they may even have a parody account on Twitter about parenting. It's only natural that principals and school administrators are using social media to share school news and building community.

Consider the experience of Robyn Jones, recently promoted to principal at Rock Prairie Elementary School in College Station, Tex.

"As principal of an elementary school, I don't think there is anything more important about school/home relationships than communication and information dissemination," says Jones. "Families are busy, but that doesn't mean they don't want and need information from the school. Just as we are looking for ways to incorporate technology into our classrooms, in order to engage students, our communication with families deserves to be engaging and easy to use, as well."

That's why Jones regularly uses the school's Facebook page, Twitter and Instagram to share information with parents on everything from weekly homework assignments to class lunch times. Jones says that social media also allows more personal relationships with her students' families.

"With over 700 children in our school, it is nearly impossible to know all of the families," she says. "When a family tags the school in a post, retweets a message or responds to the principal or teacher through email, we are getting the opportunity to engage with that family in a way that would not be possible with a paper newsletter.

"I continue to encourage our staff to utilize technology for parent communication, to help families quickly receive much-needed information. Everyone wins when the school and the families are connected."
Related: This Is How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media
Bottom line

From stronger parent-teacher relationships to creative assignment challenges, social media is poised to power a new education revolution. Businesses should take note.

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How Social Media is Reshaping Today's Education System

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Are today's students tweeting their way to better grades? More than nine out of 10 teenagers hold at least one social media account; Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Vine, Twitter and Facebook rule the lives of most middle and high school students.

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By Debbie Marsh
Communicator
February 2015, Volume 38, Issue 6

At South Elementary School in Mooresville, North Carolina, we used the 100th day of school last year to explore technological advances. In our school's media center, we erected a technology museum highlighting the evolution of everyday items that enable us to communicate electronically, listen to music, watch movies, and play games. Exhibits examined the progression from manual typewriters to laptops, rotary phones to smart phones, 16 mm. projectors to interactive whiteboards, and vinyl record players to iPods.

The world in which these students live has changed drastically from the one their teachers experienced at the same age. The workplace they will inherit probably does not even exist. Yet, what does their classroom look like? Is it preparing them for the world they will inherit? Unfortunately, too often the answer is no.
The Challenge: Connecting the Classroom
The Common Core calls for a dynamic and connected learning environment where learners have access to an abundance of digital resources and experts beyond their classroom walls. However, even schools equipped with the latest technology may not be preparing their students for the demands of the new standards. Schools must also change their pedagogy and embrace the forums through which 21st century citizens communicate.

Fortunately, though, our district is setting an example others may emulate. Since 2008, Mooresville Graded School District (MGSD) in Mooresville, North Carolina, has embarked on an ambitious digital conversion initiative to better prepare its students to be successful global citizens in the 21st century. Every third- through twelfth-grade student was issued a laptop; K-3 classrooms are equipped with tools including interactive white boards, iPads, MacBooks, and Mac Minis. The district also recently installed more robust wireless in all the schools. With the 21st century tools in place, we turned to better using and modeling technology and social media use.

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Leveraging Social Media
Teachers have been taught to tap into a student's prior knowledge and experiences to find the "hook" on which the new content can rest. Discrete, disconnected facts or processes have little value to the learner and rarely make it to long-term memory unless a connection makes it relevant for the learner. Plus, we're social creatures who crave interconnectedness-and we learn best from those with whom we have a personal connection. This is why social media is a perfect teaching tool, and a growing network of connected teachers is using social media in their classrooms.

At South Elementary (which serves pre-K to third grade), two teachers have made social media integral parts of their classroom experience. Here are their strategies.

Blogging as a Class; Reinforcing Digital Citizenship. Kindergarten teacher Kitch Deaton uses blogs and Twitter to connect her classroom to stakeholders and connect her students to other classrooms. By blogging two to three times a week for 15 minutes at the end of the day, Ms. Deaton reinforces academic skills like sequencing, narrative writing, punctuation, spelling, audience, and author's purpose. She facilitates the keyboarding for her students, but they decide together, as a class, what is said on the blog. She uploads pictures from her phone to a site on which Ms. Deaton can control viewers and approve responses.

The class tweets with other classes across the country, learning about other communities, playing games with other classes, and developing an understanding of their similarities with other kindergarten students.

This process is very safe, but nothing is left to chance. Across the school, we teach digital citizenship with the Common Sense Media curriculum. We connect our character education objectives and digital citizenship objectives. We encourage children to apply the school universal rule, "Be Safe, Be Respectful, Be Responsible" to their digital world. Most importantly, they are then provided the opportunity to authentically practice this through social media.

Skyping to Forge Global Connections. In a second grade class, Cheryl McCrorey uses Skype to bring the world into her classroom. Her team participates in the Global Read Aloud program, which led to Skype chats with several children's authors. Then, Ms. McCrorey began an ongoing "Mystery Skype" chat in her class. Children use maps, journals, and questions to guess the location of a mystery class though a process of elimination. Through this activity, Ms. McCrorey's children learn physical and cultural geography, develop questioning skills, analyze data, and problem-solve as a team. Of course, the best part is the relationships class has developed with classes all over the country and the world! These students truly develop a keen awareness of their place in the world by examining the similarities and differences between themselves and their Skype buddies.

Skeptics and detractors who quickly point to the abuses or challenges social media can cause miss an important point. Social media is here and it's not going away. It is an integral part of the world our children have inherited. We must teach and model the responsible, safe, and respectful say in which social media must be used and model the incredible ways it can enhance our learning and our lives. Our classrooms must prepare our students for the connected world in which we now live.
Debbie Marsh is principal at South Elementary School in Mooresville, North Carolina.
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Copyright © 2015. National Association of Elementary School Principals. No part of the articles in NAESP magazines, newsletters, or website may be reproduced in any medium without the permission of the National Association of Elementary School Principals. For more information, view NAESP's reprint policy

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Leveraging Social Media in the Elementary Classroom | NAESP

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By Debbie Marsh Communicator February 2015, Volume 38, Issue 6 At South Elementary School in Mooresville, North Carolina, we used the 100th day of school last year to explore technological advances. In our school's media center, we erected a technology museum highlighting the evolution of everyday items that enable us to communicate electronically, listen to music, watch movies, and play games.

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It's overwhelming to think about packing up the summer, heading back to the classroom, and adding a new instructional strategy to your already overflowing toolbox. Yet, ostensibly, you are a fairly proficient computer user who dabbles in social media (you're reading this blog, right?), so you are curious about how it might fold into your curriculum. I apply social media in my classroom to help students view it as something that can-and will-influence their academic and professional life, hence the value of its responsible and ethical use. Here are nine strategies-one for each month of school- for incorporating social media into your classroom in ways that can encourage critical thinking through analysis and engagement.

1. Get Social
You have your unit of study and your lesson plans. Add this one small piece: everyone- including you- pick a social media service and follow someone who blogs, tweets, tumbls, scoops, or pins about the topic. If you work with younger students, you can do this as a class and use it as an opener each day or week throughout the unit. Students can write a response to the author, which incorporates what they learn in class or a summary for class that can be used as a basis for discussion. You can also form small discussion groups based on platforms or topics. The goals of this strategy are to introduce students to a variety of social media sites, teach students how to evaluate social media sources, learn the vocabulary of various social media sites (i.e. the term is tweeter not "twitterer"), help students to see social media as a source of information, and demonstrate the "social" in social media for academic purposes.

2. Blog
Chances are you give students writing assignments. And chances are, you are the only one who reads them. Yet we all know that one of the most effective motivators for strong writing is audience. Have students set up a blog and write for each other. Make sure that for each assignment they are required to comment meaningfully on two other blog posts (or else it's not social, it's just "media"). To avoid the inevitable "great post!", you should give them criteria for meaningful feedback. In my school, we have internal WordPress blogs for every student and teacher that are password protected. This makes for a great sandbox and portfolio where students can tag and track their work throughout their school years. At any time, such as when applying for college, they are able to access these posts and paste them to public sites to share their best work. There are also free platforms such as Edublogs that are tailored for teachers and students.

3. Tweet
Have all students set up a twitter account (last names discouraged) that they will use for academic purposes and create a class hashtag (this is imperative). I have had students try and use their personal account but when I followed them back, they quickly created a new account for school (I think that was valuable for reminding them about the purpose and public nature of their posts). Have students post quick homework assignments such as:

a picture of: a healthy menu item, their favorite book, something they own that they can't live without

An article about something they are studying (could assign different perspectives and use hard copies of the articles in class to do small group discussions-including source evaluation)

RT another tweeter's tweet about a topic they are studying (can't be someone they know!)

Other ideas are to have a class twitter account and talk to other classes such as #kinderchat or have a twitter competition with another class. Last year, our Environmental Science class challenged our Global Issues class to a Tweet-off. The goal was to see which class can get the most quality followers, motivated by prizes along the way (note: @SAEnviro earned @HansRosling as a follower!).

4. Scoop
Scoop.it is a great site for any kind of current news items your class follows. You can create a class page about a topic and, with an educator account ($6.99/month) student users can post articles to the page. Students are able to write their own summary or commentary of the article and others can comment. This worked well with my Middle East course and we used it to guide class discussion of current events that were guided by student interests.

5. Pin
Pinterest is a way to visually curate your interests by "pinning" them to a virtual board. Used in a classroom, these boards can curate any unit of study and multiple users can be given permission to pin to one user's board (i.e. for small group or whole class). If students are required to write a brief analysis of each pin, each board can become a visual annotated bibliography (this could also be achieved in a non-visual way through a social-bookmarking site such as Diigo). In a geography class, you could have students pin things they would pack when traveling to an assigned country (or things they would bring home). In an English class, you could have them pin the imagined treasures of an assigned character from a novel (such as Jane Austen's Emma), along with the textual support for why they chose that item. Science students could begin with an inventor and invention then pin all the things that have resulted from it, with a description of the connection. Finally, students in a language class could pin items in a vocabulary category and put the word (or word in a sentence) in the description.

6. Tumbl
Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform that is a cross between a blog and twitter. As with all social media, the key with Tumblr is authenticity and content creation. It is very easy to create an impressive Tumblr through retumbls but creating a tumblr that creates new content involves more than regurgitating content that already exists. A solution to this, which can work well for teachers is the secondary vs.primary blog feature. If the teacher creates a primary public blog, then secondary blogs can be set up as part of the primary account that are password protected. These secondary blogs are not able to follow other blogs, like posts, ask questions, or submit to other blogs. This limited use forces students to seek out content to read and to create content of their own. Tumblr could be a great way for an Activities Director to manage blogging by club presidents, an elementary teacher to manage updates about ongoing classroom projects, or a secondary teacher to assign ongoing updates about topics that the class is following throughout the year.

7. Point and Shoot
Part of being a good social media user is not just using what's already on the internet, but creating content for others. How many times have you directed students to Flickr's creative commons? And how many times have you asked students to contribute to it? The next time you go on a field trip, randomly assign students hashtags to be posted with the pictures in creative commons. For example, on a trip to the science center, students can be put into groups, given digital cameras, and assigned hashtags such as: #history, #future, #astronomy, #ocean, and #weather (#science is assumed and would be added later, along with any other appropriate hashtags the students identify). These pictures could be uploaded to Flickr and tagged with the hashtags, then saved with creative commons licenses so that others could benefit. If your school or class has a Flickr group, these pictures can be added to the pool of pictures.

8. Skype
This is not just for the friends and family we know- it can also be used to meet new friends around the world. As you read above, #kinderchat uses twitter to connect with other classrooms, which often results in kindergarten class "Skype playdates" during the school day (as a station or class activity). Skype has their own network for educators that can link classrooms based on what you teach and the projects you are interested in doing and international organizations such as iEARN have formed collaborative groups such as the iEARN Skype Community. And Skype is not just for international connections. Schools in Maine and Arizona reading a Robert Frost poem together or schools in Charleston and Gettysburg simultaneously analyzing the civil war can be very meaningful.

9. Time it
Dipity or Tiki-toki timeline platforms allow student users to collaborate on a timeline at the same time. History is the obvious subject choice for this platform but other content areas can benefit from it as well. Using the timeline contributions to generate discussion is what makes this social media. If science students were assigned various perspectives in the cloning debate, a timeline could be co-created to represent the evolution of the discussion throughout history. Additionally, students can comment on each other's posts to offer critical analysis, dissent, and support. Carry this over to classroom discussions and you will find yourself over-planned for the unit!

You can see that I lean away from platforms created for educational use and toward those that the students already use (or ones they are likely to use). I think that showing the educational uses of public social media has more longevity and applicability. There are countless other platforms to consider such as Visual.ly, Infogr.am, Goodreads, Instagram, and Vine. If you have suggestions and ways that you've used social media effectively in the classroom, please share in the comments.

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9 Ways to Use Social Media in Your Classroom

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It's overwhelming to think about packing up the summer, heading back to the classroom, and adding a new instructional strategy to your already overflowing toolbox. Yet, ostensibly, you are a fairly proficient computer user who dabbles in social media (you're reading this blog, right?), so you are curious about how it might fold into your curriculum.

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Introducing Social Media to Elementary Students

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Introducing Social Media to Elementary Students