Social Media

I have been cautious with my use of social media in my personal life and this has influenced the use I make of it in teaching. I do have personal social media accounts but I’m definitely a lurker rather than a poster! Milla Inkila, one of our Mindlab tutors, quotes that 95% of traffic on social media is lurking. I feel supported!

Twitter for student learning

Returning to my teaching practice, I used Twitter for the first time last year. I had met some teachers at a Wellington school and they suggested that we both read the same book using global readaloud and then use Twitter to comment on the book as we read each chapter. Karen Melhuish’s paper discussing professional learning using social media identifies many benefits which apply to this learning opportunity; enabling collaboration, connectivity, accessing diverse perspectives. My experiences didn’t quite line up with the possibilities this first time. The class were excited about sharing their thoughts about the book with another class. We did tweet backwards and forwards but I had set up one class account so I had control and I think that the students felt less ownership of their posts because of that. The writers of the Open University’s Innovation Report comment that a social media site requires a skilled facilitator to initiate, filter resources and engage people. On reflection the communication and therefore the learning between the two classes would have been more effective if the teachers involved had spent some time defining the learning purpose (as recommended by Sean Lyons) and coordinating so that we were reading the same part of the book at the same time.

Twitter and whanau

I also used Twitter as a way of connecting with whanau for two terms; posting photos of class activities, reminders about upcoming events. At the end of this time I emailed all the parents in the class to ask them if they considered it worthwhile. The general feedback was that many of them were not using Twitter and because the information wasn’t delivered directly to them, they weren’t interested in using the browser to see what was happening in class. Using this feedback, I have now switched to Seesaw which had a 75% uptake last year and in the current year 66% of students have a parent connected after 2 weeks. For each connection, there is a chocolate bar, I’m sure that is helping too! Seesaw also meets my concerns relating to privacy and identity, recognised as potential negative features of social network sites in Karen Melhuish’s paper. Seesaw allows the teacher to approve all content and set up student content so that only the teacher and the connected parents can see it.

Facebook and resources

I use social media for my own professional development in a limited way using the Primary Teachers’ Facebook page. My use is at the level of accessing resources but not participating. Karen Melhuish points out in her paper that ‘lurking’ provides benefits to the lurker but doesn’t build the social media community.

My next step is to become ‘civic minded’ and start contributing. My plan is to start a professional learning group within our school to share our learning experiences from Mindlab. Watch this space…

References

Melhuish, K.(2013). Online social networking and its impact on New Zealand educators’ professional learning. Master Thesis. The University of Waikato. Retrieved on 05 May, 2015 from ttp://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/han...

Sharples, M., de Roock , R., Ferguson, R., Gaved, M., Herodotou, C., Koh, E., Kukulska-Hulme, A., Looi,C-K, McAndrew, P., Rienties, B., Weller, M., Wong, L. H. (2016). Innovating Pedagogy 2016: Open University Innovation Report 5. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Retrieved from http://proxima.iet.open.ac.uk/public/innovating_pedagogy_2016.pdf

Education Council.(2012). Establishing safeguards.[video file]. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/49216520