Social Studies: Schools Are Using a Variety of Social Media Tools to Help Students Connect and Work Together

This is the first in a six-part monthly series examining how different technologies can help schools enhance collaboration among students. Here we look at the benefits and challenges of offering access to collaborative learning tools such as blogs, wikis, and discussion boards. ERIC SHENINGER, the principal at New Milford High School in Bergen County, NJ, is well-known in ed tech circles as an evangelist for the use of web 2.0 tools in K-12 education. New Milford has made collaboration a pillar of its educational platform, and Sheninger believes that social media helps students learn how to collaborate. fact, he argues that many students are already collaborating with technology--and schools need to catch up. In many ways, school has been the opposite of real life, he says. Kids are collaborating and connecting all the time outside It's time to experience a shift in schools and mirror that real world within the walls of our school. Members of a recent panel of trend-watchers convened by T.H.E. Journal shared Sheninger's enthusiasm for injecting social media into the curriculum. Author and consultant Susan Brooks-Young noted that social media allows schools to model digital citizenship behaviors and gives students the chance to reach an audience that includes peers and experts in fields they are studying. Educational computing expert Gail Lovely asserted that social media is a natural fit for education, since all learning is social. Yet that doesn't mean that adoption of these tools is a snap. Lovely went on to caution that schools using publicly available platforms must protect students from advertising and unwanted content. There are also teachable moments when students post inappropriate material. To get a fuller picture of the pitfalls and dividends, we asked several innovative instructional technology leaders to describe their early experience helping teachers use social media to boost collaboration among their students. A Full Social Media Toolkit Two years ago, New Milford High started using Google Docs, and it is now a Google Apps Students can work on the same documents from various locations and at different times. That makes it easier for our teachers to assign group activities, Sheninger explains. Teachers use the text-message feedback ser vice Poll Everywhere for informal assessment and group activities. Others use Glogster, a tool to for creating interactive posters. Twenty years ago, we created collages in class, he adds. they create interactive posters. They are like collages with embedded video, and students collaborate to create them. Sheninger says his first challenge was simply making teachers aware of all the tools at their disposal. We had to do some professional development with teachers and push them in the right direction, he says. We had talked a lot about student engagement, but stressed that if students are collaborating, they are engaged. Now his teachers, across many subject areas, are taking advantage of social media. An AP biology teacher created a shared hashtag on Twitter for students to use when completing an assignment about the stages of meiosis. The creative challenge was to be succinct enough to describe each stage in 140 characters or fewer. A group of New Milford students who recently went on a 10-clay trip to Europe to study the Holocaust blogged about their experience every day. Sheninger says one key to getting teachers excited about social media is to avoid making anything mandatory. I am careful not to push or to dictate, he says, because then you get resentment and resistance. move toward empowerment and autonomy. The group of New Milford teachers using social media has grown from a small number to a significant portion of the staff as an increasing number have found that these tools promote collaboration and media literacy, Sheninger says. …