Social media (Week 5)

Some of the group started to investigate social media in week 4, however this week was the 'get go' for me.

Like many people I am something of a Facebook addict, but cannot really see how it fits in with education. What it does present to my mind is many safeguarding issues, so I am always thoughtful about that.

I had not really considered Pinterest to be a form of social media, I thought it was just for females to plan their weddings on using secret boards (sorry). Having looked at it critically I now start to understand its potential and have got an account. The number of teachers with incredible ideas that they make freely available via Pinterest is remarkable. I made a board with one pin and was then thrilled to discover further suggestions arriving on my phone that linked to this one pin. I now see why is is a form of social media. I also realise that one of my daughters gave me a very good explanation about Pinterest months ago, which I did not heed at the time. Take a peek at a pin on our teachers board.

I have created a Pinterest board called Cellular respiration and populated it with a range of things on this topic. Many of the animations I wanted to pin were unpinnable, which led to me becoming a little frustrated with it. I also did not find it as easy to use as I had first imagined. I think Pinterest will probably be one for me to use to organise my things, I cannot envision asking students to visit any of my boards, but I keep an open mind.

I have also joined Delicious and got the app for my phone too. What this does is store links and allow you to identify key words associated with each one. There are different ways to search for links on Delicious, but using key words becomes a good way to find links you may have forgotten about. This surely will be good for me because I have been storing links for years now on titled Word documents (control + click!), in a folder called 'Source files' (not sure why I called it that). I have one file at home and another at work. With cloud storage and Delicious I will be able to access my links anywhere. Now I need to build my collection. The only aspect that will diminish the usefulness of Delicious is my love of PowerPoints with hyperlinks ......

This is now the 8 February 2014 and I am now updating my thoughts on Delicious. On my iPhone I was chuffed to discover that like Pinterest, it suggests links for me, but then was less chuffed to discover the app is not optimised for iPhone 4s and does not work well. Logging on with my PC has also been problematical and so for now I have abandoned Delicious.

Reflection is a very important thing to do, most people are convinced of that I think. We need to take time to ponder and evaluate every aspect of our lives. At my college we are trying to foster this habit in students by asking them to write in a 'Learning Journal'. Now this is a beautiful idea and one I fully subscribe to. A physical, handleable article: the journal itself, can make a strong impression on a young person and become something of value. They simply pick it up and open it, faster than any device. Yet there is a downside. Such things are bulky, can be lost, are not that secure and cost money. Through doing this course I have come to the opinion that we should ask young people to blog. This is something free and flexible which the young person can make truly theirs, displaying their own unique identity through their blog posts. Along the way developing valuable IT skills, due to the inbuilt features of blogs.

So which blog to use? Kidblog is clearly great because it makes the users part of a Kidblog community and gives teachers complete control over their students blogs and user accounts. Would this be the best option for students in a 16+ college? My experience of young people is that they decide in nanoseconds whether they like a thing or not and my feeling is Kidblog would be a not. Too much interference from adults is possible and even the name sounds too young. I currently feel Blogger would be the best site to use, because as part of the 'Google family' of apps it offers students amazing design based on Googles superior algorithms. With one Google account you have it all. I would be massively in favour of promoting blogging and am going to start with my tutees.

The real revelation for me was our teachers explanation of how to use Twitter as a feed of bespoke information ready for me, the user to consume. This was brilliant, I got an account and have started to use Twitter. I am not sure why I decided to follow NASA, there are only so many pictures of planets I can take.

So I need to think about how Twitter can be used as a teaching and learning tool. I found this wonderful linear list which I am going to link, so I can keep it forever. Twitter allows communication between teacher and student / student and student / other combinations, including parents and carers. It allows the teacher to create a feed of information they want the student to engage with, to pose questions and disseminate course-related information. Students can search on Twitter to discover knowledge for themselves, they can follow relevant people and post tweets to summarise their learning. We all need to learn to use the hashtag. This is such a lot for me to understand and internalise.

I am going to start here: trial use of Twitter with one group (probably my tutor group), create a feed specific to this group, ask them to follow this feed, start to post things I want them to read, disseminate information of all sorts and finally, ask them to post a tweet of what they have learnt after some lessons. This feels very daunting, but I think it needs to be done.

The main barrier for me is always the same: remembering to do the new. Life seems so busy and actually setting aside time to master a new technology, such as Twitter, is a challenge. This is the same for the students, I know some do use Twitter, but I am not sure how many? I think if I am going to do it I have to do 80% of the work and make it very easy for them to engage with it. So the barriers are: time constraints and unfamiliarity - this applies to us all.