Social Media

I can remember back in 2008 when a friend of mine called me and asked why I was not on Facebook yet.  My response was, “What is Facebook?”  He laughed and chastised me saying, “Dude, you have never heard of Facebook?”  

He explained it was kind of like MySpace but not as cheesy.  I laughed and figured I would give it a try. 

Eight years and 868 friends later, I must say that rarely a day goes by when I have not checked my Facebook account.  I remember that initial surge of friend requests that came pouring in minutes after I created my account.   It was then that I began to realize the potential power of social media and networking.  All of a sudden, friends who I had not spoken to since grade school were reaching out to me to say hello.  I was reunited with family members that I hadn’t seen in decades.  My Uncle moved to Florida after some rough family issues he experienced here.  None of our family members knew where he moved to or what he was doing with his life.  We weren’t even sure he was still alive.  Until one day, I found him on a Facebook search.  Now, even though we still have not gotten back to person, we check in with each other once a month and follow each other’s status updates.  The power of social media in general is unbelievable. 

It could have the same effect within education.  I think it is frustrating that so many schools and teachers are hesitant to adopt social media in the classroom.   According to the  “University of Phoenix® College of Education survey conducted online by Harris Poll in April among 1,002 U.S. K-12 teachers finds only 13 percent of today’s K-12 teachers have integrated social media into classroom learning, with an overwhelming majority (87 percent) reporting they have not embraced social platforms.” I believe there is a reluctancy to adopt because teachers are naturally protective of their students.  When people can talk behind a keyboard they may say things that they wouldn’t say face to face.  This can open up the door to bullying and inappropriate comments.  Teachers don’t want to open up gateways that could lead to bigger issues.  Security is also a concern.  Parents and teacher wonder, who else can view the student’s information?  There is a fear out there that once something is posted on the web, it is always out there.  There is also an understandable fear that pedophiles may be lurking looking to impersonate other young kids and approach them online.  Social media has potential vulnerabilities from this perspective and therefore needs to be used with some caution.  However, many apps, such as Edmodo have created safe social media environments for education.  Teachers must give out codes to students for them to be able to access a virtual classroom.  Everything that is posted inside of Edmodo is monitored by the teacher just as it would be in a real classroom environment.  Edmodo is not unique.  There are many safe educational platforms for teachers to use.  I think educators, just need to get over the stigma that it is unsafe.  Once a safe environments is created, teachers are able to communicate with students and their parents like never before.  The potential pros that social media can bring to the classroom within a safe environment far outweigh the cons. 

Part of what I want to do as an Ed Tech consultant is to help open the eyes of educators who are hesitant to adopt technology and show them new ways to use social media, social photos and social videos,   According to an August 2015  press release from the University of Phoenix, one of the reasons teachers don’t implement technology within the classroom is because of a lack of tools and training.  “Almost all (95 percent) of K-12 teachers say they have had some level of training related to integrating technology in the classroom; however, more than half (62 percent) have had minimal or no training in the area of interacting with students and parents through social media. Nearly half (48 percent) of K-12 teachers express the desire to learn more about integrating technology into the classroom.” This is exciting to me because it means there is a lot of opportunity out there.  My goal is to help educators overcome the fear of technology and learn new and exciting ways to leverage technology to engage their students and make their jobs easier.  This will be challenging but one of the reasons I chose this major was because this was where my passion lies.

Future Trends

     I first explored a few of the gaming applications that were in this week’s lesson.  I really liked Arcademics.  Arcademics is a combination of Arcade games combined with Academics.   The entire notion that education can be fun is the entire reason I chose this major in college.  I had my 8 year old daughter check this out to see what she thinks of some of the games that are offered on this site. This site has a wide variety of learning games for early elementary students including matching, mathematics, and language arts.   It took me a while to be able to actually type this blog post because my daughter was hogging the computer playing the Grand Prix multiplication game so long.  This game was even fun for me to play.  Once you begin playing you have to answer multiplication problems quickly.  Every time you answer a question your Grand Prix car gets a little boost of speed.  The faster you answer the faster your car goes.   The entire time you are competing against other cars.  My daughter forgot she was learning.  Instead she was just having fun.  I loved it.  I didn’t want to stop her.  This is something so simple and easy for teachers to use in the classroom, yet her teachers at school do not promote these kinds of activities.  While it is great to watch her enjoy learning through games, I often get frustrated taking these classes because I see how much better education could be for my own kids if their teachers would implement even half of the ideas we research. 

     For Virtual Reality, I tried to check out Teen Second Life.  Years ago, I had tried playing the normal Second Life in real life but quickly found that this would take a lot of time that I didn’t have to really get into this game so I dropped out before I got addicted.  Second Life is a virtual word where you can create a world and live a life online just as you do in the real world.  You can make money, have a job, build a house, and make friends with other Second Lifers.  You can even get married in Second Life.  It is almost scary.  There may still be my character walking around on the grid somewhere from years ago.  I abandoned Second Life once I realized how entrenched people could actually get into something like that.  When I saw that there was a Teen second life, I wanted to check that out to see how different that would be from the normal second life.  I found that it “was” (past tense) almost the same.  The major difference between Teen Second Life and Second Life was that Teen Second Life was more heavily monitored and adult content was banned.  However, Teen Second Life is now closed.   Apparently the creators of Second Life closed Teen Second Life in 2011. I was not able to find out why.  However, I can probably come up with several reasons that may have factored into the decision to close it.  I was mostly interested in Second Life because of how scary of a platform that could be for people, especially teens.  Teenage years are tough and many teens can be pretty mean.  I can just imagine how mean some teens may could be to one another if they were able to hide their identity and say whatever they wanted from their keyboard.  Although tis was monitored, I still can imagine that kids would find a way to take it too far.  Although something like this could be very valuable in education because most kids would use it properly for good social collaboration and learning; I could see a small percentage ruining it for everyone else.  Teens just are not mature enough in my opinion to behave appropriately, especially when given anonymity. 

     I also checked out Quiver as one of the examples of Augmented Reality.  This is incredibly cool.  Basically, kids can color an image on paper and then launch an app on their tablet that uses a camera to capture the colored image.  Once the image is captured, the image comes to life in the form of Augmented reality.  Students could draw a horse and then watch the horse come to life on the screen right before their very eyes.  Now this is engaging.  I showed this to my daughter as well and now I have to get this for her for Valentine’s Day!  This has a major WOW factor component to it.  When I was a child and I colored in a color book, I always imagined what it would be like to have that image come to life.  Now it actually does, (well it virtually does.)  I am going to show my daughter’s teachers some of these apps and see if maybe they will begin to open their eyes to some of the cool things that are out there.

  Games/Simulations, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality all have the potential to drastically change the way we educate students.  Although many people think games and VR is too violent or that multimedia can be a bad influence we must also remember that it can be a wonderful influnece on our kids.  To ignore technology or to say that it is bad for education is doing our kids a great disservice. "The trick is to find good role playing games, simulation games, or adventure games that do not embrace violence or excessive sexual simulation" (creatingtechingsite.com, 2011)

     When I was a student, we learned about a DNA strand by seeing a diagram in a text book.  Blah!  With Augmented Reality, a student could actually manipulate a DNA strand that could be hovering in front of them.  After manipulating the strand, the student could see what the effects were by changing the DNA slightly or drastically.  With this type of hands on technology.  Students will have the ability to research and learn about things they may have never had access to before.  "Wherever it is too dangerous, expensive or impractical to do something in reality, virtual reality is the answer. From trainee fighter pilots to medical applications trainee surgeons, virtual reality allows us to take virtual risks in order to gain real world experience." (Virtual Reality Blog, 2015) This has real educational value.  I especially think of students who are considering going to medical school someday.  It may b e worth putting them through a virtual reality lesson that has them virtually place their hands on a beating heart just so they could determine if that indeed was something they have passion for.

     Teachers will have the ability to allow the 3D models to teach for them.  Teachers can act more as facilitators.  No longer will it be required for the teacher to be the know it all, end all of all knowledge in the classroom.  With gaming, VR, and AR, available teachers will be able to let the technology do most of the teaching while the kids soak in the knowledge.  This is truly an awesome way to educate people.  

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources is a controversial topic because it lies in the crossroads between the right to be prosperous and free knowledge-share. In the TED NYED video, David Wiley talks about how the great thing about sharing information is that we don’t have to give up the information we have in order to pass it on to another person.  We can learn from each other.  We can learn collaboratively and collectively by passing on the information that we have to others.  Wiley argues that all educational information should be passed on freely for the betterment of society. 

Although this sounds ideal, what about the people that worked extremely hard to publish their stories, research, knowledge, etc.? Are they supposed to give up that information to society for free? I believe if people are not getting compensated for the work they are producing they will stop doing the work and a lesser amount of research will be performed.  However, on the flip side, if charging money for written materials s a large deterrent for knowledge-share, than we are doing ourselves a disservice.  Open source content supports the idea that people should share materials fairly whereas our capitalist society dictates that people should get paid for the materials they publish if they so choose. 

Personally, I see both sides and feel there has to be some kind of balance between both sides.  Right now it is common to see open source application offer a free version plus a paid version.  The free version is basic while the paid version offers more features, functionality and possibly more access to other resources.  Google supports allowing the publishers to determine if they need to get paid or not be paid.  Some books on Google are free and can be rented like a library book.  Others must be purchased or rented.  On the Google Books website it states, “Copyright law is supposed to ensure that authors and publishers have an incentive to create new work, not stop people from finding out that the work exists. By helping people find books, we believe we can increase the incentive to publish them. After all, if a book isn't discovered, it won't be bought.”

To me this is probably the best compromise.  This allows teachers to gain access to most common knowledge basic information.  Plus it allows teachers to gain access to additional resources at a cost, so that the developers, publishers, writers, etc.…will still be encouraged to produce more materials.  

Wiley, David, (2010, March 6), TEDxNYED, Open Education and the Future [Video File], Retrieved from https://blackboard.utdl.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_138141_1&content_id=_4445941_1

Google Books, Retrieved February 06, 2016 from 

            http:www.google.com/googlebooks.com/perspective