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A year after seventh grade teacher Elizabeth Delmatoff started a pilot social media program in her Portland, Oregon classroom, 20% of students school-wide were completing extra assignments for no credit, grades had gone up more than 50%, and chronic absenteeism was reduced by more than a third. For the first time in its history, the school met its adequate yearly progress goal for absenteeism.
At a time when many teachers are made wary by reports of predators and bullies online, social media in the classroom is not the most popular proposition. Teachers like Delmatoff, however, are embracing it rather than banning it. They argue that the educational benefits of social media far outweigh the risks, and they worry that schools are missing out on an opportunity to incorporate learning tools the students already know how to use.
What started as a Facebook-like forum where Delmatoff posted assignments has grown into a social media component for almost every subject. Here are the reasons why she and other proponents of educational social media think more schools should do the same.
1. Social Media is Not Going Away
In the early 1990s, the Internet was the topic of a similar debate in schools. Karl Meinhardt was working as a school computer services manager at the time.
“There was this thing called the Internet starting to show up that was getting a lot of hype, and the school administration was adamantly against allowing access,” he says. “The big fear was pornography and predators, some of the same stuff that’s there today. And yet…can you imagine a school not connected to the Internet now? “
Meinhardt helped develop the Portland social media pilot program after Delmatoff saw his weekly technology segment on the local news and called to ask for his advice. In his opinion, social media, like the Internet, will be a part of our world for a long time. It’s better to teach it than to fight it.
Almost three-fourths of 7th through 12th graders have at least one social media profile, according to a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The survey group used social sites more than they played games or watched videos online.
When schools have tried to ban social media, now an integral part of a young person’s life, they’ve had negative results. Schools in Britain that tried to “lock down” their Internet access, for instance, found that “as well as taking up time and detracting from learning, it did not encourage the pupils to take responsibility for their actions.”
“Don’t fight a losing battle,” says Delmatoff. “We’re going to get there anyway, so it’s better to be on the cutting edge, and be moving with the kids, rather than moving against them…Should they be texting their friends during a lecture? Of course not. They shouldn’t be playing cards in a lecture, they shouldn’t be taking a nap during a lecture. But should they learn how to use media for good? Absolutely.”
2. When Kids Are Engaged, They Learn Better
Matt Hardy, a 3rd and 4th grade teacher in Minnesota, describes the “giddy” response he gets from students when he introduces blogs. He started using blogs in his classroom in 2007 as a way to motivate students to write.
“Students aren’t just writing on a piece of paper that gets handed to the teacher and maybe a smiley face or some comments get put on it,” he says. “Blogging was a way to get students into that mode where, ‘Hey, I’m writing this not just for an assignment, not just for a teacher, but my friend will see it and maybe even other people [will] stumble across it.’ So there’s power in that.”
Delmatoff says that at first her students were worried they would get in trouble for playing because they actually enjoyed doing activities like writing a blog.
“But writing a blog, that’s not playing, that’s hard work,” she says. “Karl and I started thinking we were really on to something if kids were thinking that their hard academic work was too much fun.”
Her students started getting into school early to use the computer for the social media program, and the overall quality of their work increased. Although Delmatoff is adamant that there’s no way to pin her class’s increased academic success specifically to the pilot program, it’s hard to say that it didn’t play a part in the more than 50% grade increase.
3. Safe Social Media Tools Are Available — And They’re Free
When Hardy started using blogs to teach, he developed his own platform to avoid some of the dangers associated with social media use and children. His platform allowed him to monitor and approve everything the children were posting online, and it didn’t expose his students to advertising that might be inappropriate. He later developed a similar web-based tool that all teachers could use called kidblog.org. The concept caught on so quickly that his server crashed in September when the school year started.
Many mainstream social media sites like Facebook and MySpace are blocked in schools that receive federal funding because of the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which states that these schools can’t expose their students to potential harm on the Internet.
Kidblog.org is one of many free tools that allow teachers to control an online environment while still benefiting from social media. Delmatoff managed her social media class without a budget by using free tools like Edmodo and Edublogs.
4. Replace Online Procrastination with Social Education
Between 2004 and 2009, the amount of time that kids between the ages of 2 and 11 spent online increased by 63%, according to a Nielson study. And there’s no reason, Meinhardt argues, that schools shouldn’t compete with other social media sites for part of this time.
He helped Delmatoff create a forum where she would post an extra assignment students could complete after school every day. One day she had students comment on one of President Obama’s speeches; another day she had them make two-minute videos of something on their walk home that was a bad example of sustainability. These assignments had no credit attached to them. “It didn’t get you an A, it didn’t get you a cookie. It didn’t get you anything except something to do and something to talk about with other students.”
About 100 students participated. Through polls taken before and after the program, Meinhardt determined that students spent between four to five fewer hours per week on Facebook and MySpace when the extra assignments had been implemented.
“They were just as happy to do work rather than talk trash,” Delmatoff says. “All they wanted was to be with their friends.”
5. Social Media Encourages Collaboration Instead of Cliques
Traditional education tactics often involve teacher-given lectures, students with their eyes on their own papers, and not talking to your neighbor.
“When you get in the business world,” Meinhardt says, “All of [a] sudden it’s like, ‘OK, work with this group of people.’ It’s collaborative immediately. And we come unprepared to collaborate on projects.”
Social media as a teaching tool has a natural collaborative element. Students critique and comment on each other’s assignments, work in teams to create content, and can easily access each other and the teacher with questions or to start a discussion.
Taking some discussions online would also seem to be an opportunity for kids who are shy or who don’t usually interact with each other to learn more about each other. A study by the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, however, found that this wasn’t the case. The study found that using educational social media tools in one of the Institute’s courses had no measurable impact on social connections.
Delmatoff argues that with her students, however, new connections were made. “If you’re shy or you’re not popular or any of those hideous things that we worry about in middle school — if you know the answers or have good insights or ask good questions, you’re going to be really valuable online.” she says. “So I started to see some changes that way.”
6. Cell Phones Aren’t the Enemy
69% of American high schools have banned cell phones, according to figures compiled by CommonSense Media, a nonprofit group that studies children’s use of technology. Instead, Delmatoff’s school collected student’s cell phone numbers.
Delmatoff would send text messages to wake chronically absent kids up before school or send messages like, “I see you at the mini-mart” when they were running late (there’s a mini-mart visible from the school). She called the program “Texts on Time,” and it improved chronic absenteeism by about 35% without costing the school a dime.
“The cell phone is a parent-sponsored, parent-funded communication channel, and schools need to wrap their mind around it to reach and engage the kids,” Meinhardt says.
Conclusion
Nobody would dispute that the risks of children using social media are real and not to be taken lightly. But there are also dangers offline. The teachers and parents who embrace social media say the best way to keep kids safe, online or offline, is to teach them. We’re eager to hear what you think. Tell us in the comments below.
More Education Resources from Mashable:
- Why Online Education Needs to Get Social
- 15 Essential Back to School Podcasts
- How Social Gaming is Improving Education
- 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology
- 5 Innovative Tech Camps for Kids and Teens
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, dem10, Alsos
Reviews: Facebook, Internet, MySpace, iStockphoto
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We all know that social gaming giant Zynga is one of the fastest growing tech companies of all time and has turned games like FarmVille into a mainstream phenomenon. And via international expansion and deals with Facebook and Google, Zynga has continued its path to domination of the social gaming market. We have an idea of the company’s revenue and other gaming statistics, but there is some data involving the backend of the platform that has not been revealed. Today, Zynga’s CTO Cadir Lee is speaking at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference about the gaming giant’s infrastructure, business and challenges.
Lee offers the following statistics:
- 10 percent of the world’s internet population (approximately 215 million monthly users) has played a Zynga game.
- The company adds as many as 1,000 servers every week to accommodate growing traffic.
- Zynga’s properties move a whopping 1 petabyte of data daily, and the company operates its own data centers; using a hybrid private/public cloud infrastructure.
- Zynga’s technology supports 3 billion neighbor connections on games like Frontierville and Farmville.
The company itself has been steadily adding employees, through both acquisitions and new hires, and now counts more than 1,200 full time employees and includes 13 game studios.
Lee says that the three main goals of the company are to establish trust with users, make games available, and provide quality experiences for users. Challenges that the company faces, says Lee, include workload (i.e. having to add 1,000 servers in a given week). And demand is also a factor that needs to be mitigated, as game launches bring large amounts of users to the platform. Even feature launches bring massive traffic to Zynga’s servers. Lee recalls the launch of Superberries, which was planted by 10 million Zynga users. Gamers planted 700 million Superberries in the launch weekend alone.
It's Google TV week, with major announcements coming from early application development and media partners and the unveiling of Google TV hardware from Logitech on Wednesday.
How big a deal is Google TV? Mike Hudack, the respected CEO of free video publishing platform Blip.tv, wrote today that Google TV is the real deal - a technology that will knock down the walls between traditional broadcast studio TV and the long-tail of open video content produced by consumers, producing free choice and competition. It will bring new and previously marginalized voices to the world's stage. Steve Jobs said in his latest Apple TV unveiling that consumers "don't want amateur hour" on their TVs. Google vs Apple will once again be the Open Web vs. the Curated Web, this time on TV.
Sponsor
Open TV as a Game Changer
"Every once in a while a product comes along which promises to change the way people live their lives," Hudack wrote in a post today. "Google TV is one such product."
We've had a Google TV in our New York office for a few months now. It's good. Very good. The main reason why it's so good is that it, once and for all, demolishes the boundary between traditional broadcast and cable television and Internet video. People with a Google TV will no longer differentiate. It will be as easy to watch a blip show as it will be to watch a CBS show. This is fundamentally good for producers and this is fundamentally good for viewers....We're very excited. We're at the beginning of a new age, an age where the monopoly over content distribution is eroding and anyone with talent and drive can access audiences... and audiences can decide what's best for them (which is not, necessarily, what's best for the television network).
Bill Gates has a saying: people always overestimate the amount of change in the short term and underestimate the amount of change in the long term. That is as true now, in this situation, as it has ever been. Google TV will take a while to change the way people produce and consume video. But it -- and the other products it inspires -- will most definitely, over time, change the way we think about television itself. And that will be a fundamentally good thing.
Let's put it this way. In scenario A, today's media landscape, millions of TV watchers can see Glee or Dancing With the Stars with no trouble at all. The TV stations run those shows and make millions selling ads around them. In scenario B, a TV landscape powered by the Open Web, millions of TV watchers will be able to see video content made by Iraq war veterans, Mexican immigrants, victims of human trafficking, critics of industrial pollution and countless other examples of content that major TV broadcasting stations would never or far more rarely put in front of millions of people because they couldn't sell ads around it. The media universe of everyday people could be changed dramatically - and with it, our understanding of the world, each other, politics, business and culture.
Will People Watch Democratic TV?
Recommendation Apps
"Open Source application development platforms, like Google's Android TV, will also make it easier for developers to provide all kinds of useful applications to both direct our attention to content we would otherwise miss and/or to mash it up and make it more accessible in interesting ways." -Patty Seybold
As author Patty Seybold wrote last month: "Open Source application development platforms, like Google's Android TV, will also make it easier for developers to provide all kinds of useful applications to both direct our attention to content we would otherwise miss and/or to mash it up and make it more accessible in interesting ways."
Long-tail content, easy publishing to the TV, applications that provide discovery and recommendation beyond "Googling for TV" - that's a potent combination.
As reporter Patricio Robles wrote this Spring, "Google TV might be one of the most important things the company has attempted, and that alone makes it worth getting at least a little bit excited about."
Apple's curated mobile App Store has proven far more desirable than Google's bulk-bin of half-baked Android Apps. The polished chrome of the Apple user experience has helped make it nearly the most-valuable corporation in the world, in fact. Of course, Apple TV supports the open publishing platform YouTube, and Google TV will have a heavy emphasis on applications from professional content silos as well. But there is some merit to a comparison of these two as closed vs open, because of the nature of the iTunes vs Android app stores.
What do you think? Can Google TV make Open TV a winner? Or will the curated experience of Apple TV prove more compelling in reality, for most people?
Discuss
Water Droplet Bouncing on a Superhydrophobic Carbon Nanotube Array…
As the Kings of scaling, when Google changes its search infrastructure over to do something completely different, it's news. In Google search index splits with MapReduce, an exclusive interview by Cade Metz with Eisar Lipkovitz, a senior director of engineering at Google, we learn a bit more of the secret scaling sauce behind Google Instant, Google's new faster, real-time search system.
The challenge for Google has been how to support a real-time world when the core of their search technology, the famous MapReduce, is batch oriented. Simple, they got rid of MapReduce. At least they got rid of MapReduce as the backbone for calculating search indexes. MapReduce still excels as a general query mechanism against masses of data, but real-time search requires a very specialized tool, and Google built one. Internally the successor to Google's famed Google File System, was code named Colossus.
Details are slowly coming out about their new goals and approach:
