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Earn Facebook Time By Practicing Math

November 28, 2012 | 11:58 AM | By

One of parents’ and teachers’ biggest concerns about kids’ use of technology is the issue of distraction. As much as being wired can help kids with school work, it can also lead to temptations for goofing off. Pew Research Center study, “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World” recently reported that 87% of Advanced Placement and National Writing Project teachers surveyed said that “these technologies are creating an ‘easily distracted generation with short attention spans.’’’ More than half also said that digital technologies do more to distract than to help students academically.

While opportunities for social interaction online can help kids collaborate and work together on school projects, they can also be distracting. That was Pierce Higgins’ experience with his three teenage children, who spent a lot of time on Facebook. Higgins started to ask himself, “How can one harness the energy that teenagers have about their Facebook?”

Higgins teamed up with his brother, Ronan Higgins, and a group at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland to develop Aftermath, software that directs kids to a math skills game where players can earn time on social networking sites. Parents buy and install the software, then choose which sites they want to limit, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Minecraft.

Of course, these same sites are used by savvy educators to encourage kids to participate in online Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Teaching With Tech, Aftermath, Facebook

Facebook and YouTube Offer Guidelines to Help Schools and Parents

August 2, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

Flickr:Dan Taylor

By Matt Levinson

Online social giants YouTube and Facebook have taken big steps to attempt to provide guidance on digital citizenship for kids online. Google (which owns YouTube) just launched its ten-step online program for smart and safe YouTube use, with a series of instructional videos that hit on topics from cyberbullying to privacy. And Facebook has teamed up with Edutopia to help schools create social media guidelines.

As schools figure out their social media policies, Facebook is reportedly exploring allowing children under the age of 13 to use the site. “Recent reports have highlighted just how difficult it is to enforce age restrictions on the Internet, especially when parents want their children to access online content and services. We are in continuous dialogue with stakeholders, regulators and other policy makers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment” a Facebook statement says.

In the meantime, companies are sprouting up to quell (or stoke, depending on perspective) parent fears. From FBI Child ID, which “stores a photo of your child, along with a detailed description that might help others find him or her,” to Footprints, which is a location-sharing app to “help parents track their children’s movements,” parents are searching for solutions to “ease their fears,” according to a recent New York Times article.

The Times also reports that there are also slang translation apps to help parents make sense of text speak, sites that track a child’s Facebook and social media pages looking for inappropriate Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Facebook, Social Media, YouTube

How Educators Are Using Learnist

June 6, 2012 | 11:41 AM | By
By Jennifer Roland

In the weeks since Learnist launched, educators have been finding ways to put it to use.

Learnist, as many have already pointed out, works much like Pinterest — a way to catalog online resources on a topic and share them with the user’s social network. And like Pinterest, it looks like a digital bulletin board with pictures and messages, and connects with Facebook accounts. In fact, the site’s “learning boards” look quite a bit like Facebook’s timeline feature, and Facebook membership is required to use Learnist at this point.

In its current closed beta form, Learnist, launched by Grockit, is still very much in its infancy, but some curious teachers have already jumped on the wagon. Time will tell whether educators will stick with Pinterest, or migrate to Learnist because of its association with Grockit, which already has a large and loyal following as a social learning tool.

College physics instructor Leilah McCarthy created collections on subjects like electromagnetism, mechanics, and waves. High school English teacher Amy Gallagher Critchett posted lessons on grammar and writing. Also under the “Education” category are topics like Mythology, Analyzing Literature, Applying the Pythagorean Theorem, The Great Gatsby, and Common Core Math Standards.

Educators can also find some professional development, including information about flipped classrooms, technology integration, all about the collision between DIY and education, and a professional development summer camp.

Students can also use Learnist to share resources for group projects, to prepare notes to study for tests and write papers. The Facebook integration ensures that they can keep each other Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, Facebook, Grockit, Learnist, Pinterest

Schools and Students Clash Over Use of Technology

May 21, 2012 | 10:52 AM | By
By Katrina Schwartz

When it comes to using technology in school, the tension between what students and parents want and what schools allow is becoming more apparent — and more divisive.

Students want more control over how they use technology in school, but many classrooms are still making it difficult. That’s according to the most recent Speak Up 2011 report, “Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey,” which reflects the views of more than 416,000 K-12 students, parents, and educators nationwide surveyed on how technology can enhance the learning environment. They survey is produced by Project Tomorrow, an educational non-profit focused on raising student voices in education policy discussions. The theme for this survey focused on individualized learning paths.

Students aren’t just posting personal pictures and stories on Facebook — it’s just as much a part of their social lives as it is a place where they connect with each other for school work, too. According to the survey, 46 percent of students have used Facebook to collaborate on school projects, and one in 10 high school students have tweeted about an academic subject. Meanwhile, in formal classroom settings, the practice of using these online tools as an acceptable means of learning has been slow: half of all middle and high school students say they can’t access social media sites at school. Educational policy makers need to connect the dots between what motivates and encourages students to learn and what’s actually happening in the classroom, the report states.

65 percent of school principals said it was unlikely they would allow personal devices in the coming school year.

That connection might be found in students’ own mobile devices. A whopping 45 percent of middle-schoolers and 55 percent of high-schoolers say that they mainly access the Internet through mobile devices. And access to tablets doubled between 2010 and 2011 – up to 26 percent for middle-schoolers and 21percent of high-schoolers. These are increasingly important ways that students can interact with the world, follow their own interests and supplement their school-based learning.

More than half of students – 56 percent of middle-schoolers and 59 percent of high-schoolers Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Teaching With Tech, Facebook, online learning, project tomorrow, Social Media, Speak up 2011, Technology in Schools

How Should Schools and Parents Be Involved in Kids’ Online Lives?

April 25, 2012 | 4:15 PM | By

Flickr:Demos Helsinki

By Matt Levinson

Parents are constantly grappling with how to deal with online privacy issues with their kids. Issues about whether to share passwords to email and social media accounts, whether to filter or monitor Web sites, and how much leeway to give kids of different ages as they experiment with their online identities.

Because kids spend most of their time at school, it’s not unusual when questions about these issues come up at school but have to be dealt with at home — and vice versa.

A recent example presented itself when a parent discovered that her middle-school-age daughter was interested in a social network site called Zorpia, which bills itself as a site to “share unlimited photos, post journals and make friends.” She found out about it by reading her daughter’s email, a policy they had both agreed to.

But after reading a review of the site, the mother was concerned about whether it was too risky to allow her daughter to interact with strangers online. She wrote to the daughter’s school “in the spirit of keeping the school abreast of what is going on off-campus” and with the goal of “educating more parents about the types of sites that exist and what are some good, common-sense ground rules.”

The goal is to maintain open communication, explaining to kids the responsibility that comes along with having an email account.

This incident brings up a few complicated issues, including whether parents should be reading kids’ private emails, and how parents should deal with open social media sites.

But even before addressing those questions, should schools even be involved in this conversation? Is this an issue for each family to sort out among themselves? One of the reverberating effects of online life is the fluidity of the connection between different environments, and with an instance like Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Facebook, privacy, Social Media, Zorpia

Facebook Groups for Schools Raises Concerns

April 18, 2012 | 11:01 AM | By

Filckr:Birgerking

By Katrina Schwartz

The explosive growth of online social media sites specifically targeted at schools has compelled Facebook to edge its way back into the fertile ground of college campuses. Last week, the company announced a new feature available only to students and faculty with an active .edu email address, Groups for Schools. It’s billed to be exclusive — even alumni and perspective students aren’t allowed in, limiting the scope of the groups and creating something that approximates the intimacy that was Facebook’s strong suit when it first launched.

Groups for Schools is meant to network students in the same university community for social or extracurricular events, but also includes elements that make it useful as a study tool, like the popular platform Edmodo and a number of other similar sites that have cropped up. It allows students and teachers who are members of a group designated to a particular class, for example, to share comments on a class discussion and reading, as well as to share class materials like notes, assignments and calendars, up to 25 MB.

But just a week into its launch, red flags are already being raised. One of the main concerns that has not been addressed by Facebook is the potential liability that students, faculty, and universities might face for file-sharing through Facebook. Many universities are already cracking down on file-sharing through school-owned Internet networks, and Facebook’s new tool adds yet another Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, Facebook, Group for Schools, Social Media