Chapter Ten: "Socialize Learning with Social Media"

by Stacy Brown

Social media has completely altered the rules of the game. Social media is everywhere. It is hard to identify an adult who does not have some type of social media presence and it is becoming harder to find a nine-year-old who doesn't interact with some form of social media. I happen to love the use of social media and the positive connections it can influence and the bridges that it can build, no matter the distance. However, in education and in parenting, there is one aspect to social media that is not discussed as often as it should be and, for me, it represents the door stop. It's the point where we consider if and how fast we push through the door into the next space. The point is this: Legally, young kids do not have permission to use many of the mainstream social media platforms. Instagram users need to be at least thirteen years of age. However, I can think of countless children who are using Instagram that do not meet this age requirement. To further complicate our global embrace of social media, kids are often using social media platforms without having received any formal instruction on how to navigate a digital landscape. We would never put someone who is under the age requirement mandated by law behind the wheel of a car without a formal driver's education. So, why do we allow students to put themselves out there digitally without having first provided them with formal training and practice to navigate the digital highway and in consideration of the legal age requirements? I can think of several reasons. First, this is still somewhat new territory for parents and educators who do not always feel like they have an instruction manual. Second, it requires commitment or an added layer of educating kids when we don't always feel like we have the time or the resources to do so. Third, we see so many well-respected and trusted parents and educators turning their underage children loose on social media that we feel it cannot be so bad. There is much to be said for allowing children to navigate the digital world at an early age so that they can make mistakes and learn from them before the repercussions feel so extreme. We have all heard the mantra, "Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems." Why not let young kids stumble and fall on social media at an early age when the mistakes have fewer consequences?

This chapter will explore the ways that we can steer learners in positive directions as they interact with social media but in a manner that is thoughtful, age appropriate, and impactful. We tend to gloss over the age factor and yet, we can use this parameter as a guide to direct how and when social media is integrated into the learning. This is where the school librarian becomes a consultant. School librarians can leverage themselves as social media gurus, inspiring teachers to use social media as a tool to teach relevant content while cultivating strong digital citizens in the class- room and in the larger community.

The Officials and Their Stance on Social Media

School librarians are key players in evaluating and influencing their school's relationship with social media. Understanding how the school community interacts with, responds to, and views social media will guide how school librarians can integrate responsible social media usage within the classroom. These are questions to consider in advance of advocating for social media usage in school:

• Are teachers using social media and, if so, how?
• Does the school connect with current and prospective families via social media and, if so, what platforms are being used and what type of information is communicated?
• What opportunities can social media offer to students in your school?
• How can social media help fulfill your school's mission?
• What are your school administrators' attitudes toward social media?
• Which educators in your school are connected to other educators via social media and how does it benefit them?
• How can you, the school librarian, demonstrate the value of being a connected educator to the rest of the school community?

The answers to these questions will help shape the necessary areas of focus to build a framework for students to learn social media usage within the classroom.

Get in Formation

The school librarian is in a strong position to influence the ways in which social media is used throughout the school. Demonstrating the power of connections and the opportunities that can arise from these connections, school librarians are sharing good data to support a more inclusive approach for using social media in educational settings. The school librarian has a responsibility to highlight the number of curricular connections made via social media, as well as the responsibility to feature these opportunities via social media platforms, as shown by scanning the QR code in Figure 10.1.

Figure 10.1 Use of Piktochart to create an infographic for social media visuals and for school officials highlighting the effect of the school library on the learning culture (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UMWica9yq-J3E41lGSOGe2dTZ_mSKCHSK-p0M53jXzQ/edit?usp=sharing).

Leveraging the data that demonstrates the powerful connections that social media encourages, partner with school officials to create a strategic plan for how social media can help achieve schoolwide goals, as reflected in Table 10.1.

As mentioned in Chapter One, school librarians have a unique vantage point in that they work with all stakeholders connected to the school community. This allows us to see areas of growth from an aerial perspective. The examples listed in Table 10.1 are just a few of the ways in which social media can support the growth of a Future Ready School. Once the importance of your role in relationship to social media usage in the school community has been established and schoolwide goals have been identified, all players have skin in the game. Let's explore how investing in social media as a learning tool and as a way to strengthen a community can bolster programming opportunities.

Grow Your Fan Base with Social Media

Social media create platforms for not only showcasing the great learning happening in your school community but also generate programming opportunities that are inspired by the popularity of social media usage. These are some examples of strategic plays to positively leverage social media usage to create awareness and learning opportunities for all stakeholders:

• Host a student-led digital citizenship town hall for parents and educators in which a student panel share the ways in which they use social media in school to deepen their learning, share the pitfalls of social media usage and how they have grown from these experiences, and what they would like their teachers and parents to know about how they interact with social media.

  

  Figure 10.2 Sample grandparent lunch n' learn workshop high-lighting the ways in which grandparents can interact with the school via social media (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11sG6fASPoNRklp_LyPtS_Ot0fyRKMBKdTx2NMxH6UT0/mobilepresent?slide=id.g35f391192_00).

• Co-host with student leaders community workshops for parents and grandparents, teaching them how to interact with your school through social media platforms. At the same time, a workshop of this type allows participants to experience the innovation happening at your school. We did a workshop for grandparents teaching them how to interact with our school via Twitter. The first half of the workshop highlighted some of the great work our students are doing using technology tools and the second half of the workshop taught attendees the technical skills needed to use Twitter. The presentation can be viewed by scanning the QR code found in Figure 10.2. Student leaders served as floaters to provide technical assistance to facilitate getting the grandparent community active on Twitter.
• Generate an iHelp job chart that allows each student to rotate in and out of specific class jobs that teach them how to use social media responsibly. Under a teacher's class social media account, students can take turns posting on social media under the guidance of the teacher and a peer whose weekly job is to be the proofreader before the post is published. Some students are regular bloggers, some are Insta users, some are Twitter lovers, and others are not. Their comfort levels using different social media platforms will vary depending upon their individual interests, parental controls at home, and previous exposure to social media. Giving each student the opportunity to rotate in and out of a job that encourages them to represent their peers publicly via social media allows the teacher to guide them within a safe framework and grow digital citizens that make smart choices. Through these jobs, shown in Figure 10.3, learners are encouraged to think before posting, consider how they represent themselves with grammar, spelling, and word choice, and evaluate what information is considered too personal to share. This creates healthy habits for the time when they are no longer under the guidance of a social media savvy teacher and peer editor.
• Lead a TED-Ed club in which students share powerful messages about the ways in which social media impacts our world. Encouraging students to research the role that social media plays in the lives of others cultivates thoughtful social media users inspired to think before they post. Through the development of a TED talk, learners consider how they want to shape the digital representation of themselves.

I love the way that social media can be leveraged to recognize student experts in which they demonstrate their knowledge to a larger audience. We have shared countless student creations via Twitter with the makers of the tools that we are using, which has afforded us unexpected opportunities. For example, we love to create inventions with littleBits, the magnetic circuits that snap together to create an action. Students blog about their littleBits inventions and through a class Twitter account, we tweet the blog posts to the makers of littleBits. In turn, the maker of littleBits has shared some of our student works with their own social media audience, allowing us to become a chapter school for littleBits, and giving us access to littleBits challenges that have resulted in free littleBits kits to grow our resources. All of these opportunities are a result of students sharing via social media platforms under a class Twitter account and a class blog via Blogger. Our class blog tagline is "Written by students for students," because while it gives others a window into our classroom activities, it helps us generate more resources and additional learning opportunities.

Gaining Experience and Improving Momentum

Social media usage in the classroom provides experiential learning opportunities. The more that educators incorporate social media use into everyday curriculum, the more savvy we all become in navigating these platforms. If your students are under the age of thirteen, allowing them to interact on social media with the teacher as the buffer allows students to gain real-world experience under the confines of the law and with the safety of an adult. If students are over the age of thirteen, consider incorporating the thoughtful use of social media into assessment practices. Build a social media component into a rubric requiring that students share their work on a social media platform and to reflect on the outcome of doing so. The more we encourage students to think about the ways in which social media shapes their growth, the more they will consider its impact and use it for good.

Social media evokes emotion. When we watch videos, read a tweet, or listen to a podcast, we have a human response to that content. In turn, this human response helps us remember what we learn. In this way, leveraging social media to create experiential learning opportunities is another powerful play in learning. Next, I will share some of my favorite lessons, projects, and activities that have brought the learning to life by harnessing the power of social media.

Facilitate Awesome

As a school, we actively explore resources that will help us craft powerful learning opportunities for our community. One example of this is our eighth-grade Social Studies teacher, Matt Barry, and his use of Twitter and video chat technology, to reenact the Second Continental Congress. His invitation states the following:

Friends and U.S. History Teachers alike! It's almost time for the Second Continental Congress Meeting! This September 30th from 8am-11am EST, my 70 8th grade students and I will reenact the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia! In years past, we have skyped with a few classes and are opening up that chance again. We are also going to live tweet the event and use Periscope! If you are interested in tweeting with us or watching and asking questions to our class, reach out to me #davis8 #sstlap #tlap.

Students arrive to school in full costume ready to assume the identity of the delegates. Using their culminating knowledge learned over the course of the weeks leading up to this event, students are ready to actively participate in a live Twitter chat and Skype session with other students from around the country. In character, students ask questions and respond appropriately back and forth in front of a live audience of parents, students, and other educators. This event fittingly takes place in the library that has been transformed by Matt to resemble a different era. We like to say "it's not your mama's media center." It's a place that comes alive by the unique experiences that our learners bring into it. Matt sets the stage with the following notice: "Fifty-six delegates from thirteen colonies meet in Philadelphia to determine whether the actions of the British Parliament and the Crown are justified. It is May 1775 and the Battles of Lexington and Concord have taken place and our natural rights have been violated. We will meet to determine where to go from here . . .". It is one of our most highly anticipated days of the year.

Each year, specific classes in different parts of the country are regular participants while others come on board as newbies. Further inspired by Dave Burgess' model of Teach Like a PIRATE, Matt has helped develop a following of other educators who facilitate their own experiential learning opportunities to increase student engagement (Burgess 2015). In the interest of motivating others to create simulations of historical events and interesting hooks in the classroom, Matt has led professional development strands that focus on the power of Twitter in education and Dave Burgess' Teach Like a PIRATE approach to learning.

Speaking of pirates, Twitter became a stage for our kindergarteners to connect with @Mathspirates in New Zealand to participate in engineering and math challenges between our two campuses: one being in the United States and one being in New Zealand. Other classes signed on too from Canada and Australia. In fact, we discovered at times that there was a language barrier that made for some interesting outcomes, even within the English language. For example, we would take turns initiating engineering and math challenges to one another and filming our process and outcome. In one such challenge, we were to build the tallest tower using biscuits or cookies and large marshmallows. Our New Zealand pirate friends were using biscuits, which in New Zealand is not the same as biscuits in the United States. In New Zealand, biscuits are more like crispy cookies or crackers and here in the United States biscuits are fluffy and doughy. When it comes to building a tower with biscuits, the outcome would be very different depending on which version of the biscuits were used, just based on the weight and stability alone. Until we realized the difference in meaning, we were scratching our heads. It was another powerful learning experience that carried us around the globe allowing us to participate in active learning and discover differences in semantics in the United States versus New Zealand. We were able to challenge them to a dreidel building and spinning activity, teaching them about a religious symbol important to our student body. The cultural connections made via Twitter for our kindergarten students and their teachers resulted in an awesome ongoing learning opportunity infusing math skills, design skills, lessons in semantics, and relationship building.

Social media allows educators to create learning opportunities that inspire civil discourse and promote social action. Missy Stein, a sixth-grade Language Arts teacher at The Davis Academy, required that her students read The Watsons Go to Birmingham by Christopher Paul Curtis, which takes place during the Civil Rights Movement, as a summer reading assignment. Upon our return to school at the time in which students were discussing this novel in Mrs. Stein's class, Ferguson, Missouri, was ignited in fury over the death and shooting of Michael Brown, Jr., an eighteen-year-old African American man, who was fatally shot by a white police officer. Through Twitter, our sixth-grade Language Arts classes were able to live tweet with educators in the vicinity of Ferguson and engage in dialogue that explored how the present mimics the past: "As we are currently evaluating the characters in the book, the post-traumatic stress that the main character endures, and how the bombing changes everyone we will talk about (a) What has and has not changed since 1963 (b) Do we have enough facts to take a side in the Missouri case and (c) How do we examine this situation with our lens of righteousness (this is one of our five core school values)?" (Stein 2014). Students in Atlanta, Georgia, were afforded the opportunity to learn more about social injustice in Ferguson, Missouri, from individuals experiencing these events firsthand. Embracing the Twitter hashtag #TogetherWeCanChange to document and share the conversations made for a day of learning that will resonate with our students for years to come.

As social media users get younger, the stress and anxiety that parents and educators feel to bring back some level of control when it comes to social media usage among children is growing. Ben Halpert, founder of Savvy Cyber Kids, offers a variety of free resources for parents and educators to "get the tech talk started and never stop." The Savvy Cyber Kids, Inc. blog notes that the best parental controls are parents themselves (2017). With this in mind, one of the most powerful lessons using social media was dubbed ProTech the Ones You Love. In this lesson, fifth-grade students created a lesson on digital citizenship based on tips that they had learned at home. They made a short film specifying each tip and role playing these tips in practice. They debuted the film with our five-year-old learners and, together, using the tips the fifth graders shared, the five-year-old students co-wrote a blog post alongside a fifth-grade mentor highlighting what they had learned and demonstrating how to be better bloggers while protecting their privacy online.

The study of entrepreneurship presents active learning opportunities for positive uses of social media. I facilitate a sixth-grade course that focuses on the role of technology in entrepreneurship. Each of the students dream up an invention to solve a problem. They grow their business idea by crafting a business plan in Google documents, a budget in Google spreadsheets, a 3D prototype in Tinkercad, and finally a marketing campaign using a variety of social media platforms. In addition to developing an app in iBuildapp.com, they learn HTML to create their own websites from scratch to advertise their product. They use Piktochart to create an infographic highlighting their inventions' benefits. They blog about their process using Blogger.com because, as with most experiences in life, it's about the journey as much as the destination. Documenting and publishing their process offers practice in reflection and discovering areas for growth.

Passive Approaches to Learning with Social Media

There are a variety of technology tools that school librarians can introduce into the classroom that offer a safety net between sharing on the internet and gaining experience using digital platforms. Classtools.net is a robust resource that is updated regularly with new tools that mimic social media platforms to simulate the experience of interacting via social media. Below is a list of explicit examples and the ways in which these tools can be used:

• Ifaketext.com is a text generator simulation tool. There are multiple creative ways to engage learners with this tool. Examples include practicing vocabulary so that "texters" have to use the vocabulary word in context, recreating a scene from a novel in text format, describing how to solve a technical difficulty, or any other use that involves demonstrating knowledge. As opposed to just using the tool, build in a peer review process in which students evaluate how they are representing themselves through texting. Is their grammar correct? Do they use proper punctuation? Is capitalization used appropriately? Do the word choices reflect positively on the creator of the text?
• Twister is a faux Twitter account hosted by Classtools.net. Learners can generate fake tweets based on historical figures that include factual information about their role in history and the time period. Challenge learners to consider an appropriate use of hashtags. What purpose do the hashtags serve? Are they to make the tweet more discoverable by topic and/or do they provide more information about the subject?
• Fakebook is another favorite in that it allows learners to simulate the Facebook experience through interactive dialog. Fakebook users can set up an account that signifies a historical figure, a book character, a politician, a scientist, or any other individual that learners are studying. This activity encourages Fakebook creators to consider perspective, historical accuracy, and explore facts about literature or an important time period. Characters and their friends can interact on the Fakebook page to represent events as they happened. Fakebook creators can envision themselves stepping into the role of the subjects and create content according to how they believed the Fakebook friends would have engaged with one another.

The school librarian should be at the center of the efforts to promote the integration of social media into the learning community. In doing so, school librarians help ensure that the appropriate tools are being used in accordance with the law. Start a student social media club from within the library that is responsible for educating teachers about the age restrictions and safety measures relevant to each social media platform. Help teachers set up their class social media accounts so that they are using their professional email addresses and are cultivating a professional classroom profile within these platforms. Be the connected educator that brings new opportunities and relationships into the school to demonstrate the effectiveness of social media when channeled for good. Connecting with authors via social media before and after reading their books in student book clubs results in numerous Skype visits between authors and readers. Reach out to experts who can educate you, your faculty, and your students in innovative tools you are exploring as additions to the curricular experience. For example, through Twitter, we discovered a drone expert in Oregon who Skyped with our students about the pros and cons of drones in education. When a teacher or team of teachers is preparing to integrate a new technology tool into their learning that can expose students to external audiences, offer to host a pop-up seminar for their students so that they become familiar with the critical components of the digital tool. This might translate into walking students through the privacy settings, the location of the delete button, how to monitor comments, the sharing options, the points to consider before publishing, and more. Teachers will appreciate your support and your efforts to educate and assist the students. Become the role model that ignites a healthy, productive community of responsible, impactful social media users.

References

Burgess, Dave. Teach Like a PIRATE: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator. San Diego: Dave Burgess Consulting, 2018.

Stein, Michelle. 2014. "Together We Can Change." Class lecture, 6th Grade Language Arts, The Davis Academy, Atlanta, August 25.

"When It Comes To Tech, The Best Parental Control . . . Is You!" 2017. Savvy Cyber Kids (blog), October 11. Accessed February 16, 2019. https://savvycyberkids.org/2017/10/11/when-it-comes-to-tech-the-best-parental-control-is-you.