Teens and Social Media

As someone with a focus on secondary education, teenagers and  social media is an important aspect of how to use Web 2.0 for teaching and learning. So this week, I have decided to focus my blog on this topic. To begin, I am going to share some first hand observations.

This week I have observed my niece and her best friend while on a family vacation. They are both entering high school in the fall. (I recognize this is in no way a representative sample. However, it provides a good starting point.) Here are the highlights:

1. Connection to social media was almost constant, regardless of what was happening around (even while at Disney World or at the pool).

2. The main forum used was Snapchat, which I am excited to be learning more about this week.

3. Interactions were mostly personal in nature. 

4. Purpose for connecting was either making new friends (summer love) or checking-in with good friends back home. 

5. Sometimes both were connecting together on one device, but often each were on their own separate devices (sitting next to one another). 

My next post will focus on an article I am currently reading from the American Academy of Pediatrics. It is a clinical report titled, "The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families". 

In the meantime, what do you think about teenagers use of social media? 

Take my twitter poll and/or comment below. 

Social media and education

I have been wandering through Web 2.0 wonderland for almost a week and have begun to see the fun and benefit from engaging in more social media platforms. While I am still overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unknown, I have started a Twitter account, a LinkedIn account, and research exploring the possible communities I want to join. The adventure is well underway!

My last post focused on my first venture into the realm of Twitter, where I encountered an interesting tweet about the top 10 skills students need (shown below).

I did not have anyone respond to the question I posed about the role of social media in developing these skills. While my post did not spark a discussion, it did spark my own reflection and research on using social media for learning and instruction. An initial interesting thing to note is that when I searched on Google Scholar the terms "social media" and learning, I got over 460,000 hits. When I searched the terms "social media" and teaching, I got over 150,000 hits. There is definitely a lot of information out there to digest. For this post, I will focus on one report I found that I think fits really well into the discussions around the use of social media in education. 

In 2013, Pearson released a report titled, "Social Media for Teaching and Learning" (linked here). A stratified sample was taken from 1.5 million teaching faculty in higher education, resulting in almost 8,000 survey respondents. It is a very interesting read and contained many helpful infographics to illustrate the findings. It is a very interesting read and I find that it mirrors much of the discord that exists in education surrounding the use of social media. For example, according the report, faculty are more likely to use social media in their personal lives than in their classrooms. However almost 80% of survey respondents stated that digital communication increased their communication with students; and, almost 60% agreed (or strongly agreed) that the interactivity of social media creates impactful learning opportunities. In contrast, almost the same percent agreed or strongly agreed that social media is more distracting to studenta than it is helpful (Seaman & Tinti-Kane, 2013).

Obviously the debate over the helpfulness/hurtfulness of social media rages on, even within individual educators. To me, I think social media definitely has a place in the classroom. My research interests center around design, development, and evaluation of interactive learning technologies. Before embarking on my journey into Web 2.0, my idea of interactive learning technologies lived mainly in the realm of digital game based learning or problem based learning activities. As I dive deeper into all Web 2.0 has to offer, I am excited to expand my definition of interactive learning technologies to include programs such as 

How about you? Are you using any interactive learning technologies in your classrooms? If so, what are your favorites?

Reference:

Seaman, J., & Tinti-Kane, H. (2013). Social media for teaching and learning. UK: Pearson Learning Systems.