Making the case for Facebook in Education

DISCLAIMER – This post has links to  content that is on Facebook.  If you are reading this in a distinct who blocks Facebook you will not be able to view it without a filter bypass password!

During the MN State 2010 Memo conference, a media specialist announced to the group of a couple of hundred participants… “Osseo Public Schools has an opening for a Media Specialist. We filter, but we do not block content in our district. Wiki’s, Blogs, Youtube and Facebook are open and available to our staff and students”.

Youtube was open in my district only a year ago. Opening it up quickly moved Youtube from a “distraction” to innovation… and finally to a trans-formative classroom tool in less than 1 years time. Not only does it provide endless “just in time” video tutorials, curriculum support, it also has been used to showcase our students work. However, the transformation came when Math teachers decided to start posting SMART board lecture to it and use it as an integral part of their eCurriculum. (The Math department has decided to discontinue the use of expensive and antiquated textbooks and put all of their content online – but that is for another blog post!) Now, through the use of Moodle, Youtube, and other tools – students have access to learning resources 24/7. The cost for this tool = $0. The cost to support this tool = $0. The value of this tool in teaching, learning (including mlearning) = priceless!

Facebook, on the other hand, is blocked for students and staff in my district. In my own personal use of the tool, I am now recognizing that work and personal information are blurring. I subscribe to many educational Fan Pages, Groups, and have had some fantastic discussions with folks all over the world via Facebook! The comment by the Osseo media specialist resonated with me so much, that I decided I had to do something to start a conversation in my own district to consider opening Facebook to staff and students. If I were an innovative and talented teacher, who had a couple of job offers on the table:

  • District A: Great school district, great community, great kids, BLOCKS social media tools like Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook from staff and students.
  • District B: Great school district, great community, great kids, social media is OPEN to staff and students and teachers are encouraged to find educational use of the tool that all kids are using anyway.

Which one I would choose? To me its easy.   Sure, there may be those who would much prefer District A – but for district leaders – who do you want in your talent pool?

And so my journey began. The following presentation, Making the case for Facebook in education,  has been shared (f2f) with district leaders as well as our district technology committee.

While presenting, I spoke of the Osseo’s, the Mankato’s, and the District 287’s. All MN districts that I consider tech savvy, innovative, and have always been on the cutting edge in teaching and learning practices. (I also realize there are MORE MN schools than my short list!) At the request of my admin team, I developed a Google Form to find out if other schools block/don’t block Facebook and why. The form was dispersed to MEMO’s distribution list as well as other regional lists with the following questions:

Does your district currently block Facebook?

  • Yes – it is blocked for staff and students
  • Yes – it is blocked for students only
  • No – Facebook is OPEN for all students and staff

What is your district’s rationale for this decision?

I was very happy with the response. We had 67 people respond to the survey representing 59 MN districts. I decided to summarize the above questions and include the RATIONALE given by districts. View the full summary here (Google Doc).

Summary of information of the survey

Summary of respondents

My (UNOFFICIAL) analysis of the district’s rationale to block Facebook included these top 3 reasons:

  1. Safety/Content/CIPA
  2. No Educational Value
  3. Time Management/Distraction

My response to the top 3 reasons why MN schools block Facebook

Safety/Content/CIPA – In a district that blocks Facebook – most likely the only time those offices deal with Facebook is in the cases where there are discipline issues and cyberbulling. Because of this, It is hard for schools to recognize the value of something when a few of our students are not using the tool correctly. But when/where are we educating our kids on the proper use of these social tools? Many of our parents do not understand the technology nor the repercussions of posting inappropriate things on profiles. I truly feel it is our responsibility, as educational institutions, to be educating our students (as well as staff and communities) on the proper use of today’s social media – and first on the list should be Facebook. Why do we wait to have a Facebook discussion when the kid is in our office and in trouble?

As for CIPA, that is not a valid excuse. Please take note – CIPA only requires that schools (who apply for erate funds for Internet) block sites that are: obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors (for computers that are accessed by minors). If Facebook were “harmful” to minors do you think President Obama or even the MN Department of Education would have a Facebook Fan page?

No Educational Value – There is educational value with Facebook. We all need to do our homework. Besides what you already know or what you have learned from this post – here are other resources you can use to get the conversation started:

After doing your own investigations…. Start following educational entities and learn how they are using Facebook to share information as well as receive input from stakeholders.  Share what you learn/know with district leaders and staff. You should be having the same conversation in your district as we are in ours.

Time Management/Distraction – I realize that Facebook can be distracting to students and teachers. I realize that time management is always a concern and students and staff should be taught to use Facebook appropriately. If the rules are not followed, then we need policies to be put in place to address those issues. BUT, I also know that Facebook is distracting my personal time with learning. Excellent learning opportunities continue to occur for me while surfing my Facebook family and friends status updates. The potential for informal or incidental learning is tremendous and we need to figure out how we can tap into this!

I would like to complete my thoughts and say that if we continue to block Facebook in our district’s, especially for our teachers and staff, we may never realize the educational value Facebook has. As of today, my district is still blocking Facebook. But we are having the conversation! According to my results from a little survey of MN schools we are part of the NORM. Is this NORMAL good enough?

Picasa and Google Apps – Me likey!

I posted this tweet earlier today “Today I have come to appreciate how powerful Picasa and Picasa Web albums are within Google Apps. Me Likey!”

I received a tweet back from @smbeaverson – “details?”

I decided to create a little blogpost about my first encounter with Picasa within my Google Apps domain and share some advantages of the application.

Advantages

  1. I can share and give access to users within my domain to Web Albums. This includes distribution groups I have created using Google Groups OR contact lists I have created in Gmail.  For instance, we had an event yesterday (Blue Ribbon Award Ceremony – YEAH!) and I had taken quite a few pictures.  However, I also knew that other teachers\staff also had pictures too.  Giving them web album access, they can upload their own pictures vs emailing them to ME and having ME upload them to the web album.  It is as simple as sending an email! (See image below)

Note the people on the right are contact lists that I have created.  As soon as I type any email, it automatically loads from my personal AND district contacts!  Simple!  I can also decide who gets to add photos (group of people?) or just View photos.  We also have distribution lists we have created via Google Groups which allows me to instantly share an album with a single group email. (Teachers, Buildings, District)

2. What I also noted, was that we can tag people within albums, just like facebook, and I can begin associating specific people with pictures.  This is all associated with my contacts and district contact list.

3.  Picasa also has some basic photo editing features too! AND I note – Picnik is now a feature and even listed as a Google App.

4.   With the Picasa App, You can also synchronize folders on your computer.  So, as you add pics, it just sends them to the web.  (Is this good – not sure, but its doable!)

5.  You can easily create and embed slideshow widgets based on your albums.

Possible Problems

1.  Not a long term solution as you only get a 1 gb folder.  You will have to do housecleaning and teach staff/students how to conserve space by resizing images.

2.  It took me a little while to figure out how to integrate the Picasa App with the Picasa Web albums.  Training (or learning time)  is going to be needed.

3.  I havent transitioned my domain to the new Google Apps.  Right now, only very few people have access to these tools (within our domain).

My learning addiction…

Flickr image by CarrotcreativeSeriously folks – if you want a great support group while keeping a pulse on the latest technology and research,  I highly recommend you start using TWITTER!  I can not tell you how many times I have fallen into some great discussion, great research, and great resources.  Below are groups that I follow.  Check them out – find someone who interests you and by all means FOLLOW them!

On a side note – you must must must download and install an Twitter application, like Tweetdeck, to manage and track all of this information.  You can also follow and unfollow from this application.

Jen’s hints for a building a good Twitter learning community

  1. I follow people who have interesting things to say or share!
  2. I do not automatically follow everyone who follows me.
  3. When I follow someone – I look and see who they follow – after all, they get their information from somewhere.
  4. Look for the big thinkers – the people, authors, specialists  you have admired for awhile…Find them, follow them. You will be actively learning WITH them!
  5. I am not afraid to block people either.  There is alot of Internet Marketers and even some spammers (I havent had any issues in a while) that will follow me – well – if they are not up to any good I BLOCK them.
  6. Contribute to the masses – if you find something interesting, worth sharing, tweet it.  We cant learn without you!
  7. If you have a question – ask (tweet).  There are alot of helpful people out there!
  8. Its ok to shut twitter off!  Sometimes all the tweeting can be distracting – so if it is interrupting you – by all means – shut it down. (only temporarily though!)

carrotcreative. Twitter Pack. [Online Image] (March 2008).  Retrieved December 8, 2009 from Flickr Creative Commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/carrotcreative/2511539541/

Call for Collaboration

I just skimmed the May 2009 District Administration article “A Call for Collaboration” and was reminded of a group project I recently completed with some grad students from UW Stout. For the first time, in my online learning career, I have made an interpersonal connection to fellow students!  Typically, in a complete asynchronous environment this does not happen.  In a world of text, it is very hard to identify with people.  For my own personal learning journey, the best experiences come from a blend of synchronous and asynchronous tools.  With the rise of Web 2.0 tools… making that personal connection has become increasingly easier to accomplish!

If interested in learning more, you can check out our work on our group wiki OR see the summary of our project by clicking the voicethread below!  Enjoy!

Minnesota Department of Education and Twitter

This weekend I learned that the Minnesota Department of Education now has a twitter!  My very first cell phone notificaton (from them) came from the MDE Twitter account regarding the Swine Influenza virus.  Of course the topic is somewhat scary to me, but what is interesting is how this technology can rapdily inform the masses.  I noticed that there were many news organizations following MDE and I suspect that this will also be a way to alert the media?  Wow.

Twitter as a learning tool

It was probably about a year ago that I signed up for my twitter account.  I knew what it was, and had somewhat of an idea of how it worked.  But, what I didn’t really understand was the educational value to this new communication medium.  It was about two weeks ago, I was found and followed.  (somewhat of twitters way of “friending” ) Come to find out my very  first follower  was a teacher from my district and, as the systems manager for the district, I decided I should probably start utilizing this tool.

My first question I had to figure out…Will I use the tool professionally or for personal use or a little of both?

So I went back to my dusty old account and immediately started to follow the “tweets” of some of the edtech bloggers I have enjoyed over the years!

The KEY to twitter is to program the application with your cell phone! (Remember standard text charges may be applied so be careful)  I was able to set my phone up to sent my first (via text messaging) tweets to my account! Note the image below “from the web” was a short message sent via the twitter website.  “from txt” was sent via my phone!

Tweets

You also can decide which of the people you follow (subscribe to), you would like to have sent to your phone.  To test this out, I chose Scott McLeod’s and waited.

Scott McLeod

Monday morning I received my first official tweet from Scott!  He was having George Siemens do a live blogging keynote.  First of all, I had no idea who George Siemens was nor did I understand what or how you could have a  live blogging conference.  I was amazed.   Obviously while George was up giving his keynote, Scott and other students/faculty were having a side discussion about the address!  The microblogs were all recorded and then posted on Scott’s blog.  I really wish I could have heard the keynote, because the conversations they were having were very interesting.

At any rate, I now had the ability to send and receive microblog’s (aka tweets) from virtually anywhere.  I did not need a computer with a  wifi hotspot to update or receive the latest information!  This was my “aha” moment.  Even with RSS feeds, there is some limitations with being on the computer, logged in, exc.  Twitter was instant.  If I had interest in the content (limited in 140 characters) I could follow up with my computer or smartphone and explore further.  I am only beginning to understand the educational opportunities this tool can have.  It has had, in the short 2 weeks I have used it, a profound affect on my learning!

So thanks to daytonflyer for finding me and waking me up to this new tool.  I look forward to the new learning journey that lies ahead!

Glogster – Poster yourself!

I have stumbled upon a VERY cool tool called Glogster!  The educational potential for this site web2.0 site tremendous! It allows students and teachers to build posters on virtually any topic!  YThese digital posters allow students to build and interact with videos, pictures, clipart, text, and sound.

I actually utilized it while developing the framework for a Podcasting class that I am thinking about developing online.  These are the following tools I will use throughout the course.

  • Createsurvey – for my pre/post survey (link)
  • Bubbl.us – to have participants build the story or script
  • Elluminate Live to show participants how to use audacity and to check progress on their scripts
  • Glogster – to build the final story poster

I will tell you that I have spent oodles of time building this course and I would love to hear your feedback!  Check it out by clicking my Glogster Podcasting site!

You will need to have your screensize at minimum of 1024 x 728 and you will have to scroll down to view the entire page.  What do you think?  I cant tell you how many times I have seen students working on the old fashioned collages by clipping newspaper or magazine pictures out.  Think of how many trees will be saved by using this site AND how much funs students can have building them. They even have a Glogster education site that just recently opened!

Collaboration with Google Docs

For the past two weeks I have been privileged to work with two individuals, whom I have never met, on a collaborative project to build an assessment toolbox using Googledocs. We were each required to research an assessment tool and then combine the writings into one document – or toolbox. Even though I did learn about Elluminate Live! – To me the real learning occurred by participating in this activity.

With individual projects, you are in charge of everything. What does it look like? What will the content have? What will the timelines be? With the group project everyone has their own ideas and perspectives. What was even more interesting was taking the collaboration project online. F2F sessions are easy. By the end of the meeting, you can usually agree to some of the basic underlying questions. However, in an online environment, where people don’t have the same schedules, little things can be somewhat difficult to agree to. Not because of a clash of opinions, but because of time it takes to respond to the email or discussion thread. It seemed that we were never really online at the same time. Even though I believe that this may be due to some limitations in D2L, it does represent a challenge to a collaborative online project.

I have been very satisfied with our team’s efforts.  I have never participated in a Googledoc collaboration quite so large.  (meaning the number of pages – linked together like a website )  Previous use was more of a brainstorm activity on 1 page, usually after a f2f meeting.  I am pretty impressed with the tool and would like to encourage teachers and students to use it in collaborative projects.

Looking back, I wish we would have time to play with the other tools – presentation, spreadsheet, and forms.  I am sure Melissa and Dora would agree that there was a incredible amount of time spent on this project and it is nice to have it behind us.  One other thing I wish we could have dabbled in was the templates.   There are some VERY professional and PRETTY templates that might have worked great as well.  What matters most for me is I learned a ton! I see Google Docs as a huge benefit in collaborative work for online students.

Here is the Screencast Intro http://screencast.com/t/hzvvAs7hPAb
Our assessment toolbox – http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc859m82_57f68svdfn

Enjoy!

Disappointment 2.0

I am extremely disappointed.  I have been blogging for two years using edublogs.org.  About a year ago I discovered they had an excellent plugin that would allow me to measure the traffic (hits) of my blog, by using a service called Google Analytics.  Well, about a week ago my hits stopped.  At first I thought it was me and maybe my lack of good content, but I was receiving replies and still no hits.  That led me to my looking at my plugin settings and there it was…I was to be a supporter to continue using analytics with edublogs – AKA pay $40.   There was no warning.  It was gone.  Is this start of a  new trend?  Get the tools into the hands of the educators and then when the timing is right, hit em with a tab $!  As a site that is geared towards teachers and education I really have to wonder if this was in educations best interest or Edublogs?  I guess the $40 answers my question!

My reflection on blogs

In class we were learning and discussing blogs and their potential use in education.  As I look at the history of the Grin and Bear I.T. blog  it has primarily been used for knowledge sharing.   I may stumble on a website or a piece of research and share information about the topic.  Sometimes the tool is so cool that you forget how actually BORING the blog is.   Yes, I said it – boring.

What is it that makes me decide – Hey this blog is worthy of being entered into my RSS reader?  I think it is the personal touch of the author.  The content may contain reflection or it may contain topics of debate.  Heck it might contain just plain ‘ol orneriness. (The venting of others is always a good read)  What I have come to realize is the blogs that I do thoroughly enjoy AND learn from have personality.

So this leads me to how I learn.  I learn from Blogs, Wiki’s, and Social Networks.  Many of the F2F groups I meet with have an online extension to one or all of these tools.  Below is an example of my personal learning network that I developed last semester.  What other online learning tools should I be using?  (click on image to enlarge it)

Jen's Personal Network

Jen’s Personal Network

What I have learned by subscribing to blog  or any of these other tools cannot be taught in any book, in any classroom.  It is instant knowledge.  If I disagree with the opinion of the blogger, I can comment on the blogger’s page and get a side conversation going.  Or better yet, I can voice my opinion on my blog and get my audience involved in the discussion.  At any rate – what I am accomplishing is a very deep knowledge into the topic that I have access to 24/7. This truly is critical thinking at its best!