The other big news was an official announcement from Facebook about the 'Facebook for Educators' handbook that was co-written by Linda Fogg-Phillips, BJ Fogg and myself.
Linda also joined the live event to talk about teachers and Facebook. We are looking forward to getting this document to you and hearing your feedback! So stay tuned!
On Tuesday, April 19 (9:30 am PST) Facebook Live will host a live discussion focused on Facebook’s latest efforts to keep people safe online. This is going to be a great event that highlights the tools that Facebook offers parents, teachers and kids to protect themselevs online.
The event will also highlight several new initatives (nope, I can't tell you! But they are really slick!) including the project that I've been working on Facebook for Educators.
A few months ago Facebook asked BJ Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and Linda Fogg-Phillips, author of Facebook for Parents and an expert on parenting in the digital age and myself to collaborate on the Facebook for Educators project.
You'll hear more about that during the Facebook Safety event on Tuesday, but it's been a really exciting project to work on.
The team at Facebook are really committed to providing everyone, but especially teens and young adults, with a safe and secure experience when they are interacting on the world's biggest social network.
So be sure to tune in on Tuesday to get the latest news on Facebook's efforts to keep everyone safe online.
In this SlideShare presentation from SXSW 2011, Chris Traganos (@ctraganos) of the Harvard Web Working Group (@harvardwww) shares a case study of the many ways in which Harvard University uses various types of social media to connect, engage and inform students, faculty and alumni.
It's a very well done presentation and worth taking the time to learn what has worked for Harvard University and then looking at your own social strategy and finding ways to integrate some of the best practices contained in this presentation. Thanks for sharing Chris!
On Thursday, the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention will bring together communities from across the nation who have been affected by bullying as well as those who are taking action to address it.
Every day, thousands of kids, teens, and young adults around the country are bullied both online and offline. Estimates are that nearly one-third of all school-aged children are bullied each school year - upwards of 13 million students.
Students involved in bullying are more likely to have challenges in school, to abuse drugs and alcohol, and to have health and mental health issues. If we fail to address bullying we put ourselves at a disadvantage for increasing academic achievement and making sure all of our students are college and career ready.
As part of the agenda, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett will host a policy panel with issue experts including Catherine Bradshaw of Johns Hopkins University, George Sugai from the University of Connecticut, Susan Swearer-Napolitano from the University of Nebraska, as well as the Cyberbullying Research Center's Justin Patchin.
The White House Conference on Bullying Prevention will be streamed via Facebook Live starting at 12:20pm ET. President and Ms. Obama have also released a video PSA about bullying that was released exclusively on Facebook.
• Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan: Joe, a former federal prosecutor and founding member of the Justice Department's Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Units, oversees safety and security for Facebook's more than 500 million active users.
• Rosalind Wiseman: Rosalind is an internationally recognized expert on teens, parenting and bullying. Her book Queen Bees and Wannabes, was the basis for the movie Mean Girls, and her follow-up book, Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads, addresses the social hierarchies and conflicts among parents.
• Togetherville Founder Mandeep Dhillon: Mandeep is the founder of Togetherville, a social networking community designed to connect kids, friends and families. Mandeep is one of the leading voices and authorities on pre-tween and tweens and the social web.
• MTV Vice President of Public Affairs Jason Rzepka: Jason is responsible for marshaling the network’s forces to engage and activate America’s youth on the biggest challenges facing their generation.
"Setting up this Facebook page was one of the first things I did after I created my spring syllabus for this class, International Public Relations. It wasn't my idea; it was something I learned from students and junior colleagues when I returned from sabbatical.
After eight months of being in research la-la land, stepping back onto a high-speed, wi-fi campus was like moving from the cave wall paintings to, well, digital walls.
I attended a one-day university-sponsored teaching symposium and zeroed in on technology sessions to get myself up to speed. The line that really stuck with me was: "If you want to fish, go where the fish are." The fish, is seems, were all on Facebook, and I wanted to cast my net."
There are over 500 million users on Facebook with over 50% logging in at least once per day.
In the United States alone there are, as of February 2010, 108 million users at a growth rate of around 5 million new users per month. That is a 35% penetration rate of the total US population.
The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook.
Twitter
At the end of 2009 Twitter had approximately 75 million active users with a growth rate in Q4 of between 6-8 million new users per month.
There are over 50 million tweets per day as of March 2010. This is up from 3 million tweets per day in March 2008.
A recent poll conducted by YouGov found that 58% of teachers would like parents to help more with their child’s learning and more than one-third of parents want to be more involved in the youngster’s schooling.
But with half of mothers and fathers only seeing their child’s teacher once a term, parents and staff both said they wanted more opportunities to discuss feedback about pupils in less formal situations than at parents’ evenings.
Two-thirds of mothers and fathers said email would be a good way to discuss any issues, while 22% said they would like to be able to text or swap messages over the internet.
When it comes to classroom management and keeping parents informed, a lot of teachers are now using Facebook Group as an effective tool for classroom management. In the past they might have sent home a flyer with students', but it usually got lost or vanished in thin air.
Now, since most parents are one of the 500 million people on Facebook, teachers are finding Facebook Groups to be an effective and engaging way to get parents more involved in their kids' classroom.
In this news clip from CNN, teachers in Nebraska explain how they use Facebook in their classroom to help keep both parents informed and kids engaged in the curriculum. There are some really great ideas here, well worth checking out.
DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help public school students in need. Public school teachers from every corner of the US post classroom project requests on DonorsChoose.
Things like pencils for a poetry writing class, violins for a school recital or microscope slides for a biology class. Then anyone can browse the classroom requests and give any amount to the ones that inspire them.
Donors Choose is one of my favorite charities. I like to support projects geared towards kids who live in rural or inner city school districts who are looking for donations to buy books.
But the beauty of Donors Choose is that you can support any public school request you want! So if you want to support sports, technology or other projects, you can! At DonorsChoose.org folks can give as little as $1 and get the same level of choice.
Here's another way you can help DonorsChoose and learn more about the American education system. Waiting for Superman is a new documentary by Davis Guggenheim that explores the current state of education in America and how it's affecting our children.
The film was recently featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show and has received both rave reviews and condemnation. The truth, as it most often does, lies somewhere between the two extremes.
But here's the deal. Nothing will get better unless we start the conversation. And that is exactly what Waiting for Superman does so effectively. It gets the conversation going and will hopefully motivate people to jump in and help be part of the solution.
DonorsChoose is part of the solution. It's a ground level, hands on way to effect change, one classroom at a time. Here's an easy way to get involved: For each "Waiting for Superman" movie ticket purchased on Fandango or book purchased, you'll receieve a $15 gift code that you can use on DonorsChoose to help fund a classroom request.
This interactive map, powered by Bing, displays classroom projects actively seeking support that were posted by public schools in your area. The map automagically detects your location and shows local schools in your area who are seeking support through DonorsChoose.org!
So stop Waiting for Superman to find a solution! Be a superhero by getting involved in the PTA, your kids' classroom and by supporting on the ground organizations like DonorsChoose!
Update: Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, announced on the Oprah Winfrey Show that he has created a foundation—Startup: Education—with an initial gift of $100 million to improve educational opportunities for young people in America.
The foundation’s first project will support Governor Christie and Mayor Booker’s bipartisan initiative, PENewark (Partnership for Education in Newark), to ensure every school-aged child in Newark has access to a high-quality education that prepares them for a successful future and a better quality of life.
Content displayed in the Facebook Stories application comes from all
around the world and demonstrates the diversity of people and breadth
of ways they are using Facebook.
The stories are navigable via a world map and can also be sorted by dozens of
themes including, Love, Family, Reunions, Sports and College.
By visiting the National PTA Facebook Page, PTA members can view and search for stories that are of interest to them and their efforts on child advocacy.
When it comes to classroom management and keeping parents informed, a lot of teachers use the trusty ol flyer that they send home with students. Another popular tool for classroom management are Yahoo! Groups.
It may come as a surprise to a lot of people, but teachers and other educators are among the highest user demographics of Yahoo! Groups and this is also why we were integrating them into Yahoo! Teachers.
One of the big hurdles for teachers to use Yahoo! Groups was trying to get the parents to sign up and join the group. Given that Facebook has just crossed the 500 million users mark, chances are that most parents already have a Facebook account which makes it the next best choice for student-teacher-parent communication.
I was happily surprised to stumble on (thanks Matt!) this very well done Prezi on using Facebook Pages as a classroom management tool. Erin Schoening, the author of this Prezi, uses Facebook in their 1st Grade classroom to keep parents in the loop and provide narrative feedback to students. This is pretty ingenious.
Are you or any teachers you know using Facebook in the classroom? If so how's it working out? What are the concerns of parents? If you do use Facebook (or Yahoo! Groups for that matter) don't forget to get those permission slips signed.
This week Facebook has rolled out a couple new initiatives to help its community members better protect themselves against the security, privacy and other threats that have become all too common among users of social networking services.
The Facebook initiative has two parts: Facebook Security and Facebook Safety.
The Facebook Security page that has a lot of good basic information on protecting your identity, computer and privacy while using Facebook and the Internet.
The Facebook Security page is full of information on how to protect yourself from malware and other nasty bugs. Facebook Security has also partnered with McAfee, a leader in anti-virus software, to provide the Facebook community with information on the latest threats along with strategies to safeguard your computer.
In celebration of this partnership, McAfee is offering all fans on
Facebook an exclusive, complimentary 6-month subscription to McAfee
security software.
The second half of this program is Facebook
Safety, which provides resources for parents, teachers &
teens to combat
bullying, threats, embarrassing photos and other abusive behavior
posted by other Facebook users. The Facebook Safety page also has information on how parents, educators and teens can report abusive behavior and bullying to Facebook.
While Facebook has had these safety resources available before, it's nice to see them all packaged up in one spot. I think this new program will provide some invaluable resources for (nervous) parents and anyone else who works with teens and shows Facebook's commitment to keeping kids safe on Facebook.
Facebook just posted some useful tips for educators who use the popular social networking service to communicate with their students. They are pretty basic tips that are good reminders for any adults who work with kids as a teacher, scout master or youth pastor. And parents too.
Privacy is important, especially on social networking services like Facebook. Even more so when you're communicating with young adults. Here's another great resource with tips to safeguard your Facebook privacy.
So, once you get their attention, what do you talk about? Good question. Paging Hey Josh....
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