 Hello, I'm Elaine Plyvon and this is Leveraging the Power of Social Media in the Classroom. Everything that we do on the internet tells a story. Our students need to be able to understand that and we as teachers need to be able to harness that power in ways that will help students learn the content and also learn about themselves online. I won't go into a whole lot of detail about me because let's face it. You haven't come here to listen to me talk. You actually come here to learn something that you might be able to learn about something that you might be able to use in your classroom. You are not really wanting to learn a lot about me, but in case you decide that you would like to know more about me or if you would like to contact me later because I'm always happy to talk to people about individual ideas or questions that they have about my presentations, you can visit my website at www.ElainePlyvon.net. That link as well as links to everything else that I show you today as well as links to things that I may be used in the creation of this video are on the links page that are available on the K-12 online website. What I am here to talk about today is social media. Now you might think that I might be talking about how to use Twitter or Facebook or Edmodo in its normal way in the classroom as a collaborative tool and while I think that it is a really great thing to use, I also understand that there are a lot of districts where those tools are actually blocked. Many times as educators we will find that lots of websites that we want to use are blocked, but when we actually allow that to keep us from using the idea of those types of websites from our lesson planning, we are actually failing students. I don't have any research to support that, but I do have some research that I would like to talk about. I wrote an article about this for EdTech Magazine that there is a link to if you would like to have more information because this is kind of a short session and so if you would like to have more information on what I'm talking about today, you can feel free to visit that website. A 2010 study conducted by a gaming site found that the average teenager spends between two hours and 20 minutes a day online, which is kind of a lot when you think about how much time they sleep and how much time they spend at school and at the dinner table, etc. And that most of that time, 80% of that time is dedicated to social networking sites. Additionally, we all are aware that college recruiters, job coaches and people who hire people are looking at Google searches, Facebook searches, etc., to kind of get a picture of what each individual person who has applied to their institution really is all about. It's really important that our students learn and understand the power of social networking. So this particular session is going to look at some ways that we can use social networking ideas in our classroom, mostly as a method of content acquisition and assessment, but at the same time, we're going to be able to take that opportunity to have some conversations with them and help them to understand how important everything that they do online really is. Okay, so the first social media website that springs into my mind when I think about social networking is Facebook. Facebook is very popular. There are millions of users. There are users of all age groups. Whether students are using it or not at any given point in time seems to fluctuate. They'll go through periods of time where they think that it's for their parents. Then they'll go through periods of time where that's just all they're about. But the fact is that it has been prevalent enough and it is familiar enough to students that it's highly recognizable. If you show a student a Facebook webpage and ask them where to find the photos, they're going to know. If you ask them where to find out what that individual has been doing, they're going to know where to look. There are all kinds of pieces of information that are available on a Facebook page and students are very familiar with that. So which seems like a better plan? Handing them a textbook that has lots of text on it and ask them to find information in it or giving them a blank Facebook template and asking them to fill it in. So I'm going to show you some examples of some projects that have been done and I have seen done that will give us an idea of how we might use Facebook in the classroom without actually having to use Facebook itself. This particular Facebook page or fake Facebook page was made using a website called My Fake Wall www.myfakewall.com Now my fake wall is very popular, but sometimes they have some issues because of that popularity. And so I have actually put on the links page several other websites that you can use to create fake Facebook walls. I like this one just because it is the one that looks the most like a Facebook wall. Although nowadays, now that we have the timeline view, this really doesn't look like a fake Facebook wall or a Facebook wall anymore, but students still get the picture. Now the nice thing about using Facebook walls is there is so much information about an individual on a Facebook page. On this particular one that was created to be about Archimedes, you see that up here at the top we have some just general biographical information, real low level stuff, stuff that the kids researched and reported low level. Then we have got photographs, which in this particular instant this student didn't really get as into this project as what maybe he could have because he basically has just put photographs of Archimedes on here. We all know that on an actual Facebook page people put pictures of their family and their trees and their food and things like that. And so he could have really gotten into this a little bit deeper. But then as we take a look at the wall part or the status update section of Facebook, students have the opportunity to actually get into character and show us what their understanding of that individual is. What kinds of things would that person post on their Facebook wall? Who would be that person's family and who would be listed as enemies in this case? We can actually show also how would those people respond to individual Facebook statuses, would people like it? In this case, this is an individual from history. And so it's sort of a no brainer to use that for a Facebook web page. But what if we did something else? Such as using a literary character, maybe this particular Facebook fake Facebook wall was created using a PowerPoint template. And actually this particular student used it in open office because they didn't have PowerPoint available to them, but they could use the PowerPoint template in open office and press. Now, this fake Facebook wall actually has three pages to it because it has the main wall that we're familiar with. It has got a section that actually has to do with where the photographs are, are uploaded, and it also has the information page, which is where the information that people can get about that person, like what kind of music they like and things like that. This one is for a literary character. So students can analyze what they think the individual character would say on their Facebook wall, who would be their friends, and how would those friends react to their Facebook posts. Now, I think that it would be cool to add another element in here. And so one of our classes actually did one where we had Facebook pages for literary characters and then students interacted with each other as those characters and they might be characters from different books and time periods. For example, on Romeo's Facebook webpage, one of his friends was Edward from Twilight, and so they could kind of go back and forth giving each other dating advice or complaining about their dating life or whatever. It was really eye-opening to see how the students understood those two characters from two very different time periods from two very different books. And so being able to have them do that analysis really gave us an understanding of whether they understood those characters and the situations that they could bend in. Again, you'll find links to several different Facebook templates on the links page for the K-12 online conference. Ask any student how they get their news and many of them, at least at the high school level, will say Twitter. I most often in my classroom would find students, if they were off task, were usually on Twitter, kind of like me. But the interesting thing to me was that they will believe more about what is said on Twitter than they will about what they hear on the news stories or in the newspaper, if they actually read one of those. And the information spreads over Twitter much faster than it does through traditional media outlets. So one of the things that we, an idea that we came up with was to actually use Twitter or the idea of Twitter as a means to explore historical events. So students can always understand about current events that have unfolded on Twitter, like when Michael Jackson died and how quickly that spread through Twitter or the whole Egyptian uprising kind of occurring on Twitter. They understand those things. And so they're always thinking about them in today's time period, because that's when Twitter is. But if we apply those same kinds of ideas to other time periods, that can give us a great indicator of how well they understand that time period and the individuals and the way that their lives were during that time period. So we came up with a lesson that involved the Great Depression. In this lesson, students were each given individuals that they were going to be throughout this particular exercise, such as one was a banker, one was a butcher, one was a housewife, that kind of thing. So that we had, I think we had one that was an immigrant. We had several different types of individuals and each student was assigned one of those types of individuals. As they went through this activity, they did their own research to figure out what was it like to live during the Depression. They found websites that would give them actual recorded interviews of people that lived during the Depression, transcripts of interviews of people that lived during the Depression, and of course stories from the time period. And they also looked at the National Archives and pictures from that era so that they kind of got an all around view of what it was like to live in the Depression. As individuals who were living in the Depression, their task was to create Twitter feeds, much like what they would expect for a person if that person were alive today and then going through the same sorts of things that were happening in the Depression. What kinds of things would they say on their Twitter feed? That was step one. So let's take a look at that for a second. Over here on the left are some examples of some of the some of the Twitter feeds that were created. These were created using a website called faketweetbuilder and that's at www.faketweetbuilder.com and each individual student like this is the banker, show me the money. This individual student got to make tweets that were from the banker. This individual up here, Choice Cuts, made tweets that were from the butcher and Mrs. B is the butcher's wife. And so we put together these tweets to kind of show the story that was being told on the Twitter feed. And it was kind of interesting because the butcher student really got into this and even put a post on as if the butcher had checked into Foursquare somewhere. So each individual student got to create their Twitter feed, but then the other students got to take a look at those Twitter feeds and respond just like we would on normal Twitter. And we end up getting this picture of the different perspectives that were in existence at that time. And then at the end of the day or at the end of the two days is what how long this actual event took. Each individual student was tasked with creating a blog post about the day. So this is the blog post from the butcher. And we had had them actually add pictures. This individual student used one of the pictures from the National Archives. But some of the students actually went so far as to create their own depression era pictures, black and white pictures that they had gotten ideas from the National Archives and made their own pictures to put in there. What happened then was that this could be applied to situations in today. We could ask students, OK, now that you really understand what it was like to live in the depression and what were the things that were going on at that time. Can you think of any times in modern day that are sort of the same thing? And so it generated a lot of good conversation. Got the kids really understanding and interested in the depression, which is an era that is so far removed from them that it was difficult before to actually get them excited about it. And they really bought into this particular activity. There are a lot of other ways that you can use Twitter and fake Twitter feeds in the classroom. But I just frankly do not have the time to go through all of them. So I encourage you to actually think about it. Email me if you have questions about it. Read my article and try to think of ways that you can use Twitter in your classroom. A much newer social media outlet is Pinterest. Pinterest is a social bookmarking website. And for those of you who are not familiar with it, it actually is sort of like a bulletin board where people can post pictures and they can talk about those pictures or put a caption for the pictures. And it's sort of like a file cabinet. It's kind of like a social bookmarking website where you can actually keep track of different things based on particular topics. So Pinterest was such a big thing and we were trying to figure out what is a way for us to use Pinterest in our classroom. And it was really an interesting, interesting idea. And one of the first things that we did, I don't have an example to show you, but one of the first things that we did was as character analysis in an English class where students had to choose a character that they were going to create a Pinterest board and think about what kinds of things are important to that character and what kinds of things would they post on there and what would they say about them? That was really a good exercise. But sometimes we found in some classes, we found that to be too broad. But they needed a little bit more direction on what exactly they were supposed to put. Because as any of you who have actually used Pinterest knows, it can get a little bit addicting and it can get a little bit complex. You can have a lot of boards and a lot of different categories. So we came up with another idea. Using a free website called Stixie, S-T-I-X-Y dot com, which is actually just a bulletin board kind of a site. It's really cool. Lots of uses. Again, not enough time for me to go into it. But what we ended up having students do is use Stixie as a fake Pinterest board where they would actually put pictures and captions about things. But this time we gave them a specific job to do. And that was they were going to be planning Romeo and Juliet's wedding. What kinds of clothes would they wear? Where would they get married? They even actually wrote vows. And this particular student recorded the vows that they had written on Vocaroo, which is another free website. They chose where they were going to have it. What how would they decorate the flowers? What songs would they use? What are they going to wear? They already said that. And who is going to marry them? So they got to actually plan it. The students really got into it. They really thought that this was kind of cool and something they really could relate to, which is great. And then the teacher is able to just add their own little note on the board to give them their grade. And the students have put their names. I've reduced it so you don't see their names on here. But it was a great activity. It was something that they were able to really understand and get into. And it was pretty quick. I mean, the hardest part was finding the pictures and they could really get into it and get it done fairly quickly. It didn't have to take a great deal of time. But in looking at several of them, you could tell who got it and who didn't because there were some that just really did the bare minimum. And then there were others that did much, much better. Those are just a few examples of some of the ways that you can integrate the ideas around social networking into your classroom. Throughout these activities, teachers can be having discussions with students about what it means to be socially responsible on the Internet. What kinds of things are out there forever? What kinds of things do you want people to know about you? And what kinds of things do you not want people to know about you? Help them to understand that everything that they put out there, as I said at the start, tells a story. What is their story? What is your story? Again, be sure to get ahold of me if you have any questions and take a look at the links page for everything that I've shown you today.