Despite having changed the lexicon and transformed human interaction, Facebook and other social media aren't being "friended" by many primary and secondary school districts. Evangeline (Vanna) Pianfetti, former assistant dean of learning technologies and current faculty member in the department of educational psychology in the College of Education, founded and led The Moveable Feast, a statewide professional development institute for primary and secondary teachers in Illinois. Pianfetti spoke recently with News Bureau education editor Sharita Forrest about the use of social media in instruction and learning.
How are schools interacting with - or reacting to - social media?
The likelihood of finding social media as a mainstream resource in the classroom these days is not very high, for two reasons: Educators don't know how best to use the tools, and most school districts are blocking Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media so they can't be accessed at schools. Primarily, this is the result of uncertainty about what information can be found on these sites and the need to protect students.
The issue becomes reactionary instead of visionary: Because we don't know yet how to best bring them into the classroom, let's just not allow them.
You may find progressive instances where teachers are trying to integrate the concept of social media such as instant messaging. For example, a teacher might ask the class to imagine that Abraham Lincoln and political rival Stephen Douglass conducted the debate over chat media or teachers may have students tweet about the debate. These teachers are assuming that children are familiar enough with these media tools that they can talk about them, and in some instances, get approval to allow the students to use the tools in the classroom or at home for homework assignments.
But educators are really limited in what they can do with social media because of the restrictions imposed by acceptable use policies and school district policies.
Teachers are now exploring how they can use social media to better communicate with parents. They're setting up and using professional Facebook sites to establish their community of practice, to send reminders and post information about field trips and, with approval, pictures from past field trips as means of engaging the parents.
But what you are seeing happen is teachers developing dual online identities - a professional identity and a personal identity for non-school related stuff. I'm not sure that's the best practice.
The bottom line is: If we don't bring social media into the classroom, fine. But students are getting on these sites anyway. Part of our roles as educators is looking at ways to make productive citizens - helping students locate and evaluate information and what it's really telling them.
As an educator and technophile, how would you like to see schools respond?
What I want to see is not that we're restricting their use, but we're looking at ways of providing professional development opportunities to our teachers and how they should be using media. Address the hidden concerns - determine the sites that our students are visiting and figure out how we can use this to better understand our students' needs and how to help them or inspire them. We really do have to protect our students - there's no doubt about that. But what form should that take?
If you have a student who goes to a music site, and you realize that they're really interested in composing music, how can you help them do that? Can we ask the student to create a musical piece that might be representative of this era that we're studying as a way to embrace the talents that they have but also to get them to think critically about history in a way that might be more engaging to them?
We want students to be critical thinkers, problem solvers and have adaptable, flexible knowledge. Technology helps do all that. The workforce needs people who can communicate globally, so to forbid use of any tools that would help do this is wrong.
We have to be able to say: This is how we can help our students learn to use these tools in a meaningful way, make them effective in our practice and address any occurrences that are not positive.
My 6-year-old son asked me to help him use the Internet to look up the names of some of the dinosaurs that his class had studied, but he had forgotten their names. We were able to find them through images and learn about them. I could communicate with his teacher via the Facebook page and ask her which dinosaurs they discussed.
That's very powerful, when a child can come home from school and utilize these tools to help encourage his love for learning and passion for a particular topic. I'd like to see this power in the schools as well.
How can we help teachers utilize these tools?
We have to help our teachers advocate for what they need and help them understand these different technologies. They're the experts and they'll know which ones they should recommend to school officials for use in classrooms. It's a prospective advocacy - they know which ones they want.
It's important to establish a community of practice in which parents, the teachers, school officials and students are all looking at these issues and understanding that there are really good things that can come out of using social media in classrooms.
And when things occur that challenge the good learning, we have to be able to address them from multiple perspectives.