Using Social Networking Tools in K-College Instruction: Pros and Cons

Article Summary

Wade's (n.d.) article explores the impacts of social networking on K-college students both in and outside of school. Social networking sites empower students to engage in productive activities, such as finding an internship, sharing success stories/strategies to overcoming obstacles relevant to their peers (e.g.: repaying student loans), and collaborating with others around the world. Social networking sites also allow administrators to strengthen their school community. Through running social media pages for the school, parents, teachers, administrators, and students stay connected to current events relevant to the school community. Additionally, these sites give administrators chances to provide more options for parents to participate in school events. Allowing parents the option to attend meetings virtually enables a wider variety of parents to participate, including those who have obligations that would not allow them to attend meetings in person.  

Despite some hesitation about the distractibility of students when they use social networking sites during the school day, social networking sites can be advantageous to students as a collaboration and organizational tool. Learning management systems (LMS), like Moodle and Blackboard, have been prevalent in classrooms for more than ten years. Wade (n.d.) argued that the utilization of such LMSs will eventually transition into a wider use of social networking sites in classrooms. Students generally have a positive reaction towards a teacher's decision to use social networking sites in their instruction, as the sites allow students more options to share their thoughts about academic topics using platforms with which they are most comfortable. This article quotes Professor Carla Dawson from the Catholic University of Cordoba, who states that the technological trends of today become the "standard" form of communication tomorrow and stresses that schools need to adapt these modern forms of communication into their instruction in order to make instruction most relevant to the students.

a) Why do you consider this to be an example of ways in which new media and technologies can positively contribute to society?

The information in this article rings true to my observations regarding the use of social networking tools, particularly in social networking tools' ability to strengthen parent/teacher/administrator relationships. My current principal is a strong proponent for the use of new media to promote the school, and, under her leadership, our school began and maintains active Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts. My principal encourages teachers to submit pictures of classroom activities in order to promote our school and give parents and potential families a glimpse into all that we have to offer. Current parents, alumni, older current students, our Diocesan school board, and other Diocesan schools interact with posts the most frequently, which helps to promote the school to the general public. The social media accounts also greatly help in communicating urgent messages, like sudden school cancelations or reminders about PTO meetings or dress-down days.

The middle school teachers at my school have used two different LMSs in my seven-year run: During my first year, the 1:1 iPad initiative in the middle school was new, and we used Showbie as an online dropbox for students to submit work and teachers to quickly grade that work. Showbie also offered students and teachers the ability to exchange messages about assignments, as students could leave a comment in a work folder, and teachers could respond outside of school hours, which helped absent or confused students. After the pandemic hit, our Diocese switched over to Schoology, which is an LMS that offered many more options, including the ability to conduct video conferences, create discussion boards and polls, and conduct assessments online. Both of these LMSs provide(d) students with a tool in which they could stay organized with their work and upcoming tests and quizzes, ask questions to teachers, and engage in educational discussions with one another. These LMSs have many of the same characteristics as social networking sites that students use daily, except the LMSs are regulated by teachers, so students only use them as an academic tool. This allows students to learn how to effectively communicate via a digital tool so that they may some day take some of the communication and digital citizenship skills they have learned while using features of the LMS and apply them to the social networking tools that they use in their everyday lives.

b) What challenges are encountered in such contexts?

Middle schoolers are not always on task when they have a device. Even with our firewalls in place, students have the skills necessary to access blocked content. Many students are extremely tech savvy and know how to circumvent the security settings, allowing them unrestricted access to the Internet. Some students show signs of having an addiction to the iPad, as they constantly use a device at home and cannot seem to peel themselves away from the device even after a teacher instructs them to shut the iPad multiple times. We, as teachers, have to be proactive about setting boundaries within our classrooms regarding when a student can use their device and strategizing about how we can best monitor their activity/iPad usage while they are in our classroom while still delivering our instruction.

The one challenge I have observed with our use of social media is the fact that social media coverage of the school can be political in nature, as some parents deem that certain students are always making an appearance in pictures on our social media sites, while their kid rarely does. The fact of the matter is that some teachers habitually take many pictures and others deem frequent picture taking to be a waste of time or an interruption to their instruction, so the teachers who run our social media accounts do their best to make sure that the accounts have representation of all grade levels and a variety of the activities that we run.

Overall, the benefits of using social networking in K-12 or K-college settings outweigh the challenges, and I look forward to seeing how schools will continue to use social networking tools in the future.

Reference

Wade, L. (n.d.). How social media is reshaping today's education system. Center for Social Impact Communication. Retrieved February 12, 2022, from https://csic.georgetown.edu/magazine/social-media-reshaping-todays-education-system/ 

"Who am I?" - uh, again: The Internet and Professionalism Remix

"I love that my middle school yearbooks now appear as search results when people Google my name," said no sane person, ever.

During my second year at my current job, I was explaining the concept of professionalism to my eighth grade students. I emphasized that one of the primary lessons the school teaches students is how to compartmentalize their personal and more "professional" personas, which is why there are certain rules and expectations regarding language, dress codes, and mannerisms that students are expected to follow at school but not necessarily at home. I went on to state that, I, as a teacher, have to act professional in my classroom in front of my students, otherwise I might be in danger of losing my job. Of course, as I was pointing this out, one of my eighth graders questioned the professionalism part when she pointed out that some of my classroom decorations included a row of clementines on which students had drawn faces, a twig in a metallic pail, drawings of a hybrid cabbage-unicorn creature called a cabbicorn, and a canvas with a winking cow drawn in the center - and I kept a pair of bear paw slippers under my desk. Perhaps she had a point; however, I will argue that there is a distinction between silliness and professionalism: It's possible to be silly while still being professional. 

It is very easy for me to cultivate my "professional" identity at work: I have direct control my work ethic, choice of clothes and language, and my daily actions in front of my students. However, regardless of how I feel about it, my identity as a teacher is also cultivated in cyberspace - a place in which I do not always have control: Although I share my first and last name with hundreds of people in the US, the correct combination of search terms for my name will bring up a number of results over which I have no control: my page on ratemyteachers.com (the website recently took down all of the old ratings and comments, but for quite a while, anonymous ratings from former students were out in the public eye), my middle school yearbooks (courtesy of my hometown's historical society), records of my address and former addresses as well as the names of all of my relatives. I am not overly excited that any of these items exist publicly online for anybody, including my students, to access them, but, like many others (Solove, 2011), I have come to accept the fact that one cannot expect privacy in this digital age.

Lowenthal et al. (2016) emphasized the importance of professionals maintaining a personally-controlled website, as such a website "...gives professionals that is under their control to ensure consistency and reliability over time; the professionals determine how they are presented professionally online, and when work and ideas are publicly shared" (p. 323). Last semester in our Instructional Design class, my cohort members and I were required to create an online portfolio for our assignments. I opted to create a professional website that showcased my work for the class as well as my teaching philosophy, educational history, and photos of me "in action" in my classroom and extra-curricular activities. This website is public and is therefore accessible to anybody who might want to learn more about me. According to Lowethal et al. (2016), I should update my professional website at least once every six months to keep the information on the site current for any professional who may come across my site. 

To further build my professional identity, I should invest more time in maintaining an active Twitter account. My Twitter account was created for a class during my master's program, and in the ten years since that program ended, I have followed hundreds of educational professionals - most of whom are complete strangers with whom I have connected via EdChats. With this very large professional learning network, I have ample opportunities to take advantage of the knowledge base and professional expertise of this group, but I am just not logging in. If I spend more time tweeting - even if I just logged in once or twice per week - and overall maintaining a more active account, I could further build my professional identity and strengthen my connections within my PLN.

I currently believe that my professional identity is primarily cultivated through my reputation in my immediate community. I have been at my current place of employment (a small, PK-8 Catholic school) for over seven years and, in that time, have build connections with my colleagues, students, and families. They know how I run my classes, they know how hard I will work for their student and their family, and they put a lot of trust in me. I am also an active parishioner at the church affiliated with the school, and I am recognized by parishoners for my involvement in the music ministry and young adult group. There really is not much of my professional identity that is made online, as I rarely tweet or network with anybody. I had a few very positive reviews on ratemyteachers.com before the website removed all of the old reviews, which would have positively impacted my professional identity for anybody who wanted to do a background check on me. 

Like many other professionals in academia (Hinton, n.d.), my biggest challenge to my digital ecology for my identity as a teacher lies in my use of Facebook, specifically in keeping my public and private life in balance on social media. The community in which I teach is very close, and it is not uncommon for several parents, who have become close friends of mine, to become Facebook friends with the teachers, as we are all one large church and school community. I almost always accept friend requests from the parents, as most other teachers at my school do, which is very unique to my community; however, this does impact the content that I will choose to post on my Facebook page. I rarely post anything that is political in nature, as I do not want to alienate any part of my community. I do have filters for my posts, and I have all the parents/former students in one group that is sometimes filtered from my posts if I believe certain posts of mine will be considered too political, but, for the most part, the fact that parents and former students are my Facebook friends has not really impacted my posting habits, as a) I do not post very much, and b) when I do post, many times I share posts from my school's social media page, as most of my life centers around my job. 

As for my identity as a doctoral student, I do not really think I have much of an identity just yet. Obviously, I have not published any research as of yet, and my identity as a doctoral student is completely separated from my identity as a teacher, save for a few instances in which I had an assignment that impacted something I did or made at work. In some ways, I feel like I would have more of an identity as a doctoral student if I lived on campus - or had ever even been to the UF campus before - but, since I am completing my coursework through a hybrid program and COVID prevented all of my cohort's in-person sessions so far from happening, thus meaning that, two years into the program, I have never met my cohort members or professors in person before, I just do not feel that my identity as a doctoral student exists, outside of a reference to my degree on my LinkedIn profile or on my teacher profile posted to my school's website. I look forward to progressing in my program and, perhaps, building this part of my identity. Perhaps I will be able to integrate a little bit of silliness into this identity, as I do in my identity as a teacher.

References

Hinton, A. (n.d.). YouTube / "Context collapse" the. SlideShare. Retrieved February 5, 2022, from https://www.slideshare.net/andrewhinton/beyond-findability-context/44-YouTube_Context_Collapse_The_problem

Lowenthal, P. R., Dunlap, J. C., & Stilton, P. (2016). Creating an intentional web presence: Strategies for every educational technology professional. TechTrends, 60(4), 320-329. https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1141&context=edtech_facpubs  

Solove, D. J. (2011). Why privacy matters even if you have 'nothing to hide', Chronicle of Higher Education.