Celebrating Connected Educator Month (October)!!

To connect or not connect, that is the question of the modern educator…

In “What ‘Connected Education’ Looks Like: 28 Examples FromTeachers All Over”, Katherine Schulten provides a litany of positive ways that social media (Facebook to Edmodo) can be integrated into a wide variety of classrooms.

Three teachers used Edmodo to ask students to explore individual profiles of 19^th-century immigrants. The result was the students showed empathy, as well as “demonstrated deeper understanding of the mechanism by which immigrants sought cultural and societal integration in 19^th-century America” (Schulten, 2013).

AFTER THOUGHT: Wouldn’t an amazing next step be exploring the profiles of contemporary immigrants and refugees? The faces of the 19^th-century immigrants were historically much different than those coming to the United States today.

An English Language Learner (ELL) instructor at a community college is asking students to use their cell phones to take images of new vocabulary and idioms that they encounter outside of the classroom. They are using social media to build their own word lists, as well as bridge the real world with the classroom.

AFTER THOUGHT:  I would love to see those students use the images to produce storyboards that narrate their stories (fiction or real time/past or present).

Why so much hate? 

Social media is banned in the majority of the school districts across the United States.

Recently, the Los Angeles Unified School District reinitiated a $1 billion plan to put an iPad in the hands of all students. The first attempt failed because the students cracked the security settings that had locked out Internet and social media. Officials quickly confiscated all the electronic devices once they discovered the breech.

So, the unified school district wants the students to use disabled iPads to their fullest potential? I just keep getting the image of someone tying my feet together and yelling, “Run! Run!”

My daughter has long since graduated from high school (last January), but I have several memories of being asked for math help. You have lost me after basic algebra (although I can hold my own in statistics – the brain is a perplexing place to function).

After the initial eye-rolling and teenager let-down, her fingers would start wildly tapping the keyboard like a mad-scientist on the brink of world destruction when an “Ah-Ha!” would echo triumphantly through the apartment… one or several of her friends had tutored her via a variety of virtual resources from social media to video to watching real-time examples on a shared virtual document or brain storming app.

They didn’t do her homework for her. They actually helped her study virtually. They did for her what I could not.

According to Patricia Deubel (2009), the National School Board Association published studies that showed that “almost 60 percent of studentswho use social networking talk about education topics online and, surprisingly,more than 50 percent talk specifically about schoolwork.” An unofficial survey of my daughter’s social networking habits, I can easily buy into that statistic.

Social media was crucial, and still is, to her academic success.

BUT what are students doing the other 50% of time?

The answer to that question depends on what author or resource that you decide to read.

My daughter and one of our
favorite students, Se-Ra. 

Susan J. Brooks-Young (2010) argues that social media replaced all the banned public gathering spaces where youths can no longer congregate. Brooks-Young cites a collection of curfew and loitering laws that make it near impossible for students to gather, be loud, and socialize without getting into trouble with the lawman.

Insert old Western Sheriff here saying, “Why, our town shuts down at sunset and only the outlaws and teenagers roam the streets in this here parts… and I know how to take care of the outlaws and teenagers… Why, yes I do.”

Social media – good, bad, or ugly – is the public social space for millions of teens (and now people over 35 are no longer social media strangers – we have to figure out what our kids are doing somehow).

Many authors are contributing social media with the negativity and disassociation. In The Winter of Our Disconnect, Susan Maushart cites that our bodies actually produce chemical reactions when in a conversation with someone (while in the flesh) that doesn’t occur virtually. Scientists claim that depression and other ill effects can set in without face-to-face conversations. 

Maushart also goes on to identify examples of teenage violence that the perpetuator contributed to “just needing to feel alive” or some such, after being isolated in his virtual world, and apparently, was taken aback when her son could relate to such thinking.

SIDENOTE: I must admit that I don’t know any teenagers who use the dialect that Maushart is trying to capture in her epic life's tale of a family off technology… it is just makes me uncomfortable reading it (and I don’t know why).

Let’s get serious for a moment.

Both authors noted that the number one issue online is cyber-bullying and there has been a rash of accusations (accompanied withpictures of proof) followed by young suicides that have verified that the virtual world is just as weighted as the empty streets once used to be for GenXers (and all generations before). Playground bullying has been taken an unfortunate new sophistication.

Are educators more likely to identify potential cyber-bullying, if they are on the same social networks as their students? What is hall monitoring in the iGeneration age? 

Evidence has also been found that the students feel more connected to their instructors when they are on regulated social media together, as part of their class projects and curriculum. I have found that my university students are more responsive and accountable. It shows in their work and attendance.

I also know that my daughter would have never made it through math without it…

How effective is to always power-down every time that they enter into a classroom? Do we really have their attention or just their obedience?

As an educator, I prefer to have their attention.