Welcome to edWeb.net’s 15th session, the third in our sophomore year! We are very excited to have you either back or here for the first time.

We want to take a moment to thank our host edWeb.net, and our sponsor, who have supported this community since day one. We appreciate their support.

The past few weeks have been climatologically calamitous – all across the nation. We hope you are well, and we appreciate your joining us today.

This is pretty exciting. Two weeks from today, thanks to AASL and as part of Banned Books Week BBW, librarians will be celebrating banned websites awareness day, BWAD to raise awareness about the impact of Internet censorship on teaching and learning in K-12 education.

This is a hot topic. Julie Walker, Executive director of AASL sent an email last week about response to the ALA Direct newsletters in August. AASL’s, BWAD press release was the division’s most clicked on link – a real testament to its interest to the membership.

Here in edWeb.net, filtering is the most consistently discussed topic across communities. So much so that we opened a new community TEAM21 – Teachers for Educational Access to Media for 21st Century Learning. It is for all educators – even administrators (hey, even administrators they started out as teachers, and the acronym was too cool to pass up).

We need help picking a logo. Which do you like best?

Let’s be clear. Even here in edWeb.net there is a wide spectrum of viewpoints on filtering, and many people are not in favor of free-range media.

Just in the past month the national conversation on filtering has polarized. On the one hand, AASL Embraced Banned Websites Awareness day, and on the other hand…

I was talking to a friend – an elementary librarian – about this at a conference this summer, and she said, of Banned Sites, “I know it’s kind of your thing.” That gave me pause.

I don’t think of it as my thing at all. I think of it as their [kids] thing.

We need to bring the real world into learning.

We need to bring learning into the real world.

If we fail to do that, we fail to prepare our students for success in the word they live in, much less the one into which it will evolve – the one that is beyond our imagining. Ian Jukes

Last July, USA Today published an article about Banned Websites Awareness Day. I did exactly what the author told me not to do. I looked at the comments

I have NEVER seen a more compelling list of rationales for building digital citizenship into K-12 education WITH participatory media. If we don’t, our kids are going to end up thinking like these folks!

It’s professionally irresponsible NOT to teach students how to participate and publish in the real world. It is ludicrous to expect them to learn how to do that on their own without guidance or supervision.

For better or worse, participatory media IS our chief means of communication, even for these guys! They commented on the article!

of Americans who use social media want businesses to have a social media presence

of American babies under two-years-old have a social media presence

of the 500 most innovative American companies have a Facebook presence – and that is up 10 percent from a year ago.

of Americans have a Facebook presence.

Facebook YouTube Email Google Docs Google Images Google

How about this one: Students in schools that allow access to social media spend 12% more of their social media time on productivity than those in schools that censor it.

Here are ten ways in which open access to social media (technology) in school helps students (audience) become better 21st century learners.

10. Organization - coordinate a group activity 9. Connection – learn from an extended community 8. Productivity – blend learning and recreation 7. Differentiation – navigate a variety of platforms 6. Contribution – participate! It’s interactive! 5. Discussion – converse about learning 4. Reflection – debrief after the fact 3. Self-direction – Make a plan to get it done 2. Inspiration – Crowd source for creative ideas 1. Collaboration – Share the load!

If it’s so great, why is it blocked?

Misperceptions about the medium. There are a surprising number of IT folk and administrators who are not active in any kind of participatory media. They perceive it as frivolous. Most folks who are not there do and it is very hard to convince them otherwise.

I’ve participated in a few events with Eric Sheninger. When he tells his story, the first thing he talks about is how he used to block everything and confiscate mobile phones – until he, himself got involved in social media. That’s when everything changed. And change it did

Unsophisticated filters

Filters: Most districts have been in tight budget mode since 2008. In those 3 years, much has changed in the filtering business. Many IT managers, thinking small budget, haven’t broached the subject of upgrading filters. For many districts, there is no mechanism to differentiate between schools on the filtering system. Thus whatever is turned on at the high school is also turned on for K-4 kids. Obviously, this is a huge deterrent when it comes to unblocking mainstream social media sites. It’s one thing for a high schooler to have access to Facebook. It’s another thing entirely for a kindergartener. According to my sources, the costs for upgrades have plummeted in the past 3 years. This may be one way to jump-start the conversation in your district. Ask when your filter was last upgraded, then ask when you last received a quote for an upgrade.

When was the last time you were involved in updating policy? Organize a committee, appoint people, select meeting times, review the existing policy, look at models from other districts…by the time you get to rewriting the policy, you’re just sick of the whole process, you’ll write anything just to have to stop facing these people on regular basis. Then there is the whole board approval part. If you are a relatively new teacher, I apologize. If you are a veteran, I know you know what I am taking about. Policy review is something to avoid. Right?

Right? Well that is a problem folks.

I listened to a Tom Friedman interview a 6 days ago on NPR’s Morning Edition. I have to quote Friedman verbatim; because he delivered the best elevator speech I have ever heard in my life. It was 28 seconds long. Here is what he said: “I wrote a book that I started in 2004 called the world is flat. And as I started working on That Used to Be Us, I went back and I reread The World Is Flat, and I actually looked in the index. First edition. Under F. And I realized, Facebook wasn't in it. When I wrote the world is flat, and I said, “The world is flat! We are all connected!” Facebook didn't exist. Twitter was a sound. The cloud was in the sky. 4G was a parking place. Linked in with a prison. Application was what you sent to college. And Skype, for most people was a typo! All of that changed in just the last 6 years.

Now go and check when your AUP or RUA was last revised. It may be time for an overhaul.

Now go and check when your AUP or RUA was last revised. It may be time for an overhaul. There are great guides to help administrators streamline the process. CoSN published guidelines last may, and for secondary folks the NASSP published a position paper last spring as well.

Karen Cator, the US Director of Ed Tech, was interviewed by TinaBarseghian of MindShift.org out of KQUED in San Francisco

As always, all resources identified in today’s webinar are available in this session’s Diigo list

I hear this all the time. Kids do awful things to one another on social media. We just can’t let that happen in school!

Telling kids they can’t have access to social media in school sends a few very bad messages: There’s one sure fire way to make sure that kids DO do bad things there. Like anything else – only if you MAKE it a waste of time. Not if you DO your school work in the medium itself I have yet to be convinced that focusing on the teacher is the best way for students to learn. If a teacher worries that providing students with access to social media will cause him/her to loose control of the class, that’s a classroom management issue not a communication platform issue.

Infographics Facebook and social media. This came through blog a while back. And honestly, I was suspicious of the statistics, so I contacted the author. She sent me the original reports. I linked them to a blog post about this that is in the Diigo list for today’s session.

We want to take a moment to thank our host edWeb.net, and our sponsor, who have supported this community since day one. We appreciate their support.

Tweeting?

So we’ve looked at a lot of reasons why it is blocked. But let’s remember our professional objectives here.

Our job is to prepare children for successful participation in the 21st century. How can participatory media help us do that? You’ve all heard me go on about the skills, the standards, the measures of millennial preparedness. So I won’t go over them all again.

Well, maybe just a quick run through the graphics, just for fun

One more!

How do we show the non-believers that using participatory media platforms for core content instruction TEACHES these skills better than many other tools and platforms?

I am going to walk through 5 lessons with you. They are all posted on Bannedsites.info The website is a work in progress and it will hopefully represent a collaborative effort. You will see the first thing on page one is link to Gwyneth Jones’ BWAD survey.

She poste it to Twitter last weekend, and she reminded folks to take it at Monday’s TLVirtual Café! It was nice to see many of you there, by the way! It was fun to be “on the other side” of the webinar and just chat w/you all.

So back to the lessons: In the spring of 2011, as part of a social studies assignment, we asked students to exclusively use Twitter to examine unrest in the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring If social media was changing the political landscape, we thought it would be constructive to the medium to examine its influence. Students were instructed to locate Tweets with links to news sources and to retweet them with the New Canaan High School social studies department hashtag, #ncramsss,

We set up a Paper.Li, which turns Twitter, Facebook or RSS feeds into online newspapers (http://Paper.Li), to aggregate our students’ Tweets into a weekly online publication. The publication provided instructors with a digest of the class’ research activity, and a fresh look at students’ research process.   The value of seeing their work published instantly, with no option to edit their output really raised the stakes for learners.

This assignment elucidated several glaring deficiencies among learners. For one thing, students had a hard time distinguishing between blogs and reportage. Twitter provides volumes of uncategorized information at a breakneck pace and students had tremendous difficulty compartmentalizing what they were reading. While this is fairly typical, we’d never seen students so acutely aware of their inability to sort through information.

This prompted conversations about specific identifiers that could help readers distinguish fact from opinion: use of superlatives, adjectives, author’s voice,phrases like “I think” or “I Believe”, or directions like “let’s…” URL shorteners and domain names, etc. They also learned that a significant portion of Twitter traffic is designed to generate revenue. At first, students were enticed by links to abstracts on sites that required subscription membership authentication to access complete documents. They quickly became adept at discerning these and other kinds of suspicious Tweets.

  In many cases, students circumvented the news media and went straight to eyewitness sources. This prompted yet another organic teachable moment, enveloping a timeless lesson - primary sources v. secondary sources, and the role of each in the research process - in a new context. The primary instructional objective of the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum is for students to understand the nuance of bias and point of view. Using Twitter for this lesson brought students one step closer to that objective. It was an experience that would be hard to replicate in “safe”, pre-packaged, educational software.

When one student declared, “I know this is true because it says ‘trusted news source’ on the website header,” a fierce, student-generated debate about source evaluation ensued. The medium itself fueled unprecedented engagement among learners in a very old instructional benchmark.  

I’ve talked about this project before, so I won’t spend too much time on it. But when one of our English class read Master Harold and the Boys, the teacher assigned them to create PSAs

The Catcher project

Need Life Magazine logo

We use Facebook to teach communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity – not because we can’t do it elsewhere, but because students are already accustomed to contributing there, and it helps us get to our teaching objectives faster. Most of our students are adept at reading, writing, evaluating, providing feedback, expanding conversations, contributing knowledge and content on Facebook for social purposes. If our aim is to develop and apply those abilities toward learning and productivity, it saves students the cognitive process of transferring those skills to a restricted, less familiar platform. It helps them focus on improving the quality of their interactions rather than navigation. These are assessed proficiencies, and students learn from each other when they see interactions among all participating learners. While they could do this on any forum, they spend more time on this one, and are thus drawn back into the conversation more frequently. For better or worse, time, space, and clear divisions between work and play have become muddled in the 21st century. This experience teaches students to blend productivity and learning into their every day life, which sets them on the course toward becoming lifelong learners.

This is not about Facebook. What we taught on Facebook last year, we might teach on Google+ next year. The point is to deliver instruction as simply and conveniently as possible. If the instructional objective involves learning to navigate a wide range of interfaces, then by all means, take students out of the familiar realm. But if the objective is already an embedded part of student’s experience in a specific medium, and our goal is to build on that prior knowledge and apply it to a new purpose, then start in a familiar place – wherever that is. It is a simple instructional strategy to build engagement, and teachers have relied on it for years. The only difference is that many educational policy makers are not comfortable with what is familiar to students, and allowing students to use platforms educators don’t understand seems scary. Scary or not, we must empower students to collaborate with, learn from and produce for the public. It is an expectation of 21st century citizens, and they should be afforded the opportunity to have educators guide them in the process. In the current environment, many children are left to fend for themselves online without direction or supervision. It sets a great example when teachers learn in partnership with students, and that may be a sound solution to bridging the aptitude gap between teachers and students when it comes to participatory media. But it would be a societal blunder to allow students to learn without teachers.

Can start to assess collaboration and communication in new ways

When it becomes a part of your school culture to use participatory media for productivity, it changes the way kids work. This is a meeting yesterday afternoon. It was a packed agenda, and several group members had to go on to other things, but they finished the meeting on the Facebook event page through chat and posts. I wasn’t there

Let’s take a moment to thank our host, edWeb.net, and our sponsor, Follett Software Company for this chance to connect.

Tweeting?