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!
At Naperville Central, a public high school of nearly 3,000 students, educators believe exercise will not only get kids fit, but will improve learning and academic performance.
And they're putting that idea into practice for a group of students who struggle in reading and in math. At 7:45 a.m., these freshmen and sophomores start the day in the gym.
This excerpt tells the story of an academic transformation that began with a gym teacher.
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.
Royal Society Publishing science journal Biology Letters is releasing a paper about the way bees use color and space to navigate between flowers. It was written by 25 co-authors, all of whom are between the ages of 8 and 10.
Really: The 25 kids, all from the Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England, designed the experiment from the ground up, and wrote every word in the paper.
The students who published the paper were participants in "i, scientist," a project set up to engage kids with science in a hands-on way. A very hands-on way.
With help from neuroscientist Beau Lotto (whose son is in the class), the 25-person team began by thinking about the way animals—in particular, bees—perceive the world. You can read more about the Blackawton Bees study and other projects by Lotto by clicking here. The Blackawton Bee paper is available here.
This is a briliant and hands on way to teach kids science. Instead of sitting in classroom and listening to a teacher, these kids are getting a hands on experience that makes science move from theory into actual practice and proves that anyone can do science.
The 2010 Faculty Focus survey of nearly 1,400 higher education professionals found that more than a third (35.2 percent) of the 1,372 respondents who completed the survey in July-August 2010 use Twitter in some capacity.
That’s up from 30.7 percent in 2009.
This report represents the second annual survey on Twitter usage and trends among college faculty.
This year’s survey, like that conducted in 2009, sought answers to some of the fundamental questions regarding faculty members’ familiarity, perception, and experience with the micro-blogging technology, as well as whether they expect their Twitter use to increase or decrease in the future.
Meanwhile, the percentage of educators who never used Twitter decreased from 56.4 percent in 2009 to 47.9 percent in 2010. The remaining 16.9 percentage consists of those who tried Twitter, but stopped using it —an increase from 12.9 percent in 2009.
Finally, a new trend that emerged this year centered on the belief that many feel they already have too many places to post messages or check for student questions/comments. As one professor put it, “I have no interest in adding yet another communication tool to my overloaded life.”
In terms of future use, just over half (56.8 percent) of current Twitter users say they expect to increase their use during the coming academic year. Only 2.5 percent say their Twitter use will likely decrease, and 40.7 percent say it will stay about the same.
This 22-page report gives a breakdown of each survey question, including a sampling of the comments provided by the respondents. The comments allowed faculty to further explain how they are using Twitter, why they stopped, or why they have no interest in using it at all.
This guide is designed to help you understand what Facebook is and how to use it safely. With it, you will be better informed and able to communicate with young Facebook users in your life more effectively.
That's important because: 1) if something goes wrong, we want our children to come to us and 2) as the Internet becomes increasingly social and mobile, a parent’s guidance and support are ever more key to young people’s well-being in social media and technology.
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.
This animate was adapted from a talk given at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Subhasish Dasgupta (George Washington University, USA) Copyright: 2010
Abstract
In this chapter we outline how educators are creating a “mash up” of traditional pedagogy with new media to create a 21st Century pedagogy designed to support the digital learning styles of Gen Y students.
The research included in this paper is intended as a directional means to help instructors and course designers identify social and new media resources and other emerging technologies that will enhance the delivery of instruction while meeting the needs of today’s digital learning styles.
The media-centric Millennial values its ability to use the web to create self-paced, customized, on-demand learning paths that include using multiple platforms for mobile, interactive, social, and self-publishing experiences.
These can include wiki, blogs, podcasts and other social platforms like Twitter, Emodo and Facebook. New media provides these hyper-connected students with a medium for understanding, social interaction, idea negotiation, as well as an intrinsic motivation for participation.
The active nature of today’s digitally connected student culture is one that more resourcefully fosters idea generation and experience-oriented innovation than traditional schooling models.
In addition, we describe our approach to utilizing current and emerging social media to support Gen Y learners, facilitate the formation of learning communities, foster student engagement, reflection, and enhance the overall learning experience for students in synchronous and asynchronous virtual learning environments (VLE).
According to a study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly one-third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced.
In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.
A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.
A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship.
Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace.
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.
I think Michael has some really great suggestions on how to get back into the school groove--especially if you're going to a brand new school this year.
And for those of us who aren't going back to school, these are a great refresher of things that are pretty much part of Life 101.
So sit back and enjoy this very special episode of Buck to School......and have a great school year!
Although adults often jump at the chance to catch up on their reading during vacations, many children and teenagers, particularly those from low-income families, read few, if any, books during the summer break from school.
But the price for keeping the books closed is a high one. Several studies have documented a “summer slide” in reading skills once school lets out each spring. The decline in reading and spelling skills are greatest among low-income students, who lose the equivalent of about two months of school each summer, according to the National Summer Learning Association, an education advocacy group. And the loss compounds each year.
Now new research offers a surprisingly simple, and affordable, solution to the summer reading slide. In a three-year study, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, found that simply giving low-income children access to books at spring fairs — and allowing them to choose books that most interested them — had a significant effect on the summer reading gap.
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