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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

Should Adults Control Kid-Created Content?

June 5, 2012 | 11:54 AM | By

Screenshot

Fourteen year-old Adora Svitak wishes that Facebook came up with a popup window that read, “Are you going to regret this later?” before allowing people to post their updates.

It’s that kind of long-term vision that’s missing from a lot of how kids act and how they’re being educated about using social media. And because adults are navigating the same uncharted waters alongside — or in many cases, far behind — their kids, sometimes using what’s considered common sense at the time might not even be enough of a filter.

Svitak is already a fairly savvy social media user herself, having launched her own Facebook brand, website, and even TED talks. She and her peers are pushing boundaries on sites like Tumblr, posting videos on YouTube and creating their own blogs — and getting a lot of traction.

Cases in point: Teenager Rebecca Black’s Friday, last year’s viral YouTube music video (more than 32 million views) and the Kony 2012 video, whose 90 million views was propelled by kids passing it along to each other.

“We are co-creators of the world we live in. We’re not just watching the screen in front of us. Whether it’s good or bad, you can’t argue it’s influential.”

“We can have tremendous influence on the cultural landscape,” Svitak said at the recent Big Tent event in San Jose. “We are co-creators of the world we live in. We’re not just watching the screen in front of us. Whether it’s good or bad, you can’t argue it’s influential.”

She’s got a point there — kids’ influence can be powerful, especially with the help of social media sites like YouTube and Twitter. But unlike the kids who create the content that goes on those sites, the companies that host the content are forced to weigh in on whether it’s “good” or “bad,” or more pointedly, what they should do about it.

Victoria Grand, director of communications and policy at YouTube, said company staff is constantly searching for questionable content and deciding what action to take. For example, a spate of Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, blocked sites, Internet filtering, Social Media, YouTube

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

Budding Writers Benefit from Sharing Their Work Online

April 23, 2012 | 9:53 AM | By

Figment

By Kyle Palmer

When Jacob Lewis was growing up, he liked to write “really terrible Stephen King-like fiction stories.” Looking back on those early works, the former managing editor of The New Yorker said he’s glad they never saw the light of day. But for thousands of teenage writers across the country, Lewis has helped do the exact opposite.

The Web site Figment—founded by Lewis and New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear in 2010—gives young writers a forum to freely publish their work. The site now boasts more than 220,000 registered users and has stocked a library of more than 350,000 individual pieces, ranging from reflective poetry to multi-chapter novellas.

“We really thought at first that it would be more of a social network site,” Lewis said. “But it has been all about project creation. The amount of new content our users produce is amazing.”

Lewis said Figment users post more than 1,000 new original pieces every week, many of them only a few hundred words representing a large range of genres, from heart-tugging romance to dystopian fantasy.

“It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there like they have,” Lewis said. “We knew there was a need for this, but we’ve been surprised at the passion and the ownership our users have shown.”

“We just want these young writers to see how empowering it is to be able to share your ideas.”

Similar to Facebook, Figment users—most of whom are between 13 and 24 years old—create a profile and upload their work, giving it a title and picking from a large selection of stock images to use as cover art. Other users can read the pieces online and leave comments and provide feedback.

Not all pieces are read widely, but some works, like Diamonds in the Rough by a user from Wisconsin who goes by the screen name Fish Fingers, have received 130 comments and more than 200 “Hearts” (Figments’ version of Facebook’s Like button).

“Wow! This [story] is beautifully sad!” one user commented about Fish Finger’s work.

“Your similes are impeccably accurate,” wrote another.

“The one negative thing I’d say is that I think it would’ve been better if you had let people figure out the moral for themselves then say what it is at the end of the story,” posted another user. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Figment, Social Media, writing

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