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April 25, 2012 | 4:15 PM | By

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

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
April 18, 2012 | 11:01 AM | By

Facebook Groups for Schools Raises Concerns

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: Tech Tools, Facebook, Group for Schools, Social Media
April 11, 2012 | 12:00 PM | By

Do Students Have the Right to Post Negative Comments Online?

Flickr: Zawezome

By Corey G. Johnson

Civil rights groups recently intervened in a free-speech controversy at the San Francisco Unified School District after a school suspended three high school seniors and banned them from graduation and prom over comments they made online.

The students were suspended from George Washington High School after a teacher learned about postings on a Tumblr page called “Scumbag Teachers.” Some of the comments allegedly linked to the students included: “Teaches Pink Floyd for 3 Weeks; Makes Final Project Due In 3 Days” and “Nags Student Govt About Being On Task; Lags On Everything.”

The school principal accused the students of cyberbullying. They were suspended from school for three days, banned from prom and told they couldn’t walk with their classmates during graduation. One of the students was kicked off the student council.

The Asian Law Caucus and ACLU of Northern California said they were concerned that the students’ rights were being violated and wrote letters to district officials questioning whether the students and parents were given due process. The district then reinstated the students.

The district’s initial punitive actions prompted student outrage on other Tumblr sites. One student stated:

Find it ironic how Washington led the American Revolution against the British soldiers for freedom from King George, and here you are, sitting in this school trying to control the students the exact same way the king was, by taxing not our goods, but our freedom of Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, aclu, Facebook, Free Speech
March 19, 2012 | 10:42 AM | By

Facebook Meets College Apps with Mission Admission

By Nathan Maton

Games and Facebook: We know those are two sure-fire ways of getting kids’ attention. Combine them, and you might have a tool to motivate low-income high-schoolers to apply to college.

That’s the premise, anyway, for launching Mission Admission — to help students who don’t know what steps to take to get in the college application game.

“These kids didn’t know what kinds of classes they should be spending their time on or basic vocabulary like what is a letter of recommendation,” said Tracy Fullerton, a USC professor and the lead game designer on the Mission Admission project about students she worked with, during a seminar at the recent SXSW conference. “They didn’t know how to break down the steps into things they could accomplish. They didn’t know whether the Frisbee club or physics club would look better on an application.”

The process of applying for college is already a game, Fullerton says. “It’s just usually played once at such high stakes. If students could play it in a fun and snarky environment, they could learn about the strategies of time management and how to focus their efforts in school.”

The process of applying for college is already a game. It’s just usually played once at such high stakes.

In Mission Admission, you play a different student every week applying for the same school. You can “upgrade” your school to give it a better reputation, and sort what classes and extra curricular activities to take.

“When they play the first time they’re just learning the game just like everyone would if they were playing the real game, the real college game,” Fullerton said. “At the end of it they’re like, ‘I see what I should’ve done.’ Then if they play again with another group, they’ll be the teacher and they’ll Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Collegeology, Facebook, Games, Mission Admission
March 16, 2012 | 11:22 AM | By

Kony 2012: Viral Video Prompts a Teachable Moment

Screenshot of Kony 2012 YouTube Video

By Matt Levinson

Over the past weeks, schools across the country have had the chance to witness the lightning speed with which viral videos can travel around the globe, particularly when young people are involved. The trigger in this instance: Invisible Children, a 30-minute video highlighting the horrors of child abduction and other atrocities perpetrated by the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony that has drawn more than 100 million hits.

How should schools handle the tidal wave of emotion, euphoria and what some criticize as “clicktivism” that has consumed the interest and attention of students?

I first learned about the video from an eighth-grade student, who described it in vivid detail. I was approached by our Dean of Students, who said a group of sixth-grade girls had stormed his office wanting to know if they could show the video at an assembly and raise money for the group Invisible Children.

Soon after, a sixth grade science teacher wrote me asking for advice about an issue that had arisen in his class: the Kony video. As part of the study on clean, available drinking water, the science teacher showed a short video called Ryan’s Well about a seven-year-old boy from Canada who raised enough money to drill a well for a school in Uganda, an act that then spiraled into the creation of Ryan’s Well Foundation.

During the discussion around Ryan’s Well, a few students in every one of the science teacher’s class eventually led to the Kony 2012 YouTube video. “Needless to say, this was an amazing learning moment for me and the students,” he said.

“Now the pace of change is so incredibly fast, is there enough time for understanding and reflection?”

The science teacher took the opportunity to ask questions and looked into the Invisible Children video. He learned about how videos go viral and he examined the authenticity of the Invisible Children foundation, learning that their practices are not as clean and clear as the students had led him to believe, and the problem with oversimplifying a murky and complicated political conflict.

Most importantly, he contacted his students’ parents to let them know about the buzz around the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Facebook, Kony 2012, Social Media
January 24, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

Watch Out, Facebook: A New Social Network Targets Alumni

Dave Herholz

There has been a lot of excitement about bringing social networking tools into the classroom in recent years. These technologies have been touted as ways to encourage students to collaborate and communicate — both with teachers and with one another. It’s a way for students who might feel too shy to speak up in class to actually get to fully participate in class discussions. These tools also offer an important way to bridge school and home, particularly if students (and in some cases, their parents) can log in at any time to monitor school activities.

But is there a way to take what we’ve seen with educational social networking and extend that community into a life-long relationship with a school? That’s the hope, in part, of a new education startup called Alumn.us that is tackling an important, but largely unrecognized problem faced by many schools: there is no alumni network. There is no connection to a school once you’ve graduated.

Sure, you might be able to find the folks you went to school with on Facebook now. Indeed, there have been suggestions that Facebook will soon replace the traditional ways by which we connect with the people we went to school and graduate with.

But those Facebook connections — as interesting as though they might be — really do not fulfill the same sort of role of an alumni network. Connecting alumni from the same graduating class is only Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Alumn.us, alumni, Facebook