Derek E. Baird is a leading kid culture expert, futurist & author who helps brands, educators & parents connect to kids & teens through culture, social media & technology.
Results of new research conducted in August 2018 by The Harris Poll for Pearson Education.
The report explores the education, learning and media consumption habits and preferences of Generation Z.
One surprising finding in this report is that Gen Z students still like to have teachers give them printed handouts and paper-based learning resources. So while they're mobile natives, looks like they still enjoy being analog.
This is an interesting and worthwhile report for anyone who works in education technology and is looking to create learning experiences that resonate with Gen Z.
VR, especially when combined with storytelling, enable the student to participate in the story, develop empathy to experiences outside their current realm of understanding and fully immersed in their learning.
While there’s much hype around the use of VR in education, how are teachers using this emerging technology in the classroom? What do students think? Those are just some of the questions asked by research conducted by Foundry 10, a Seattle-based non-profit.
Foundry 10: Students & VR Pilot Program
In 2015, 2015, Foundry 10 launched a pilot project to study the impact and student sentiment towards the use of virtual reality in their classroom and curriculum. Foundry 10 reached out to educators who expressed an interest in utilizing VR in their classes and provided them with headsets.
Instagram has launched an initiative called "Instagram Together" to showcase their continued commitment to developing tools that address bullying, mental health, and other topics impacting tweens, teens and young adults.
As part of the Instagram Together campaign, several influential members of the community are showcased, sharing stories of how they use the Instagram ecosystem and hashtags (like #ItsOkayToTalk) to share their mental health journey with others to build (or find) a network of support.
Instagram is #HereForYou
As part of Mental Health Awareness month, Instagram announced a hashtag campaign called #HereForYou, which highlights how the social network has helped support its community members struggling with mental health issues.
Reporting Self-Harm on Instagram
Members of the community can also anonymously report others who they feel may be in need of mental health support.
The Self Harm Reporting feature allows users to report a mental health concern to Instagram and send the user a message with mental health resources in their country.
These resources also display when someone visits a hashtag for a sensitive topic, like hashtags associated with self-harm, eating disorders, and suicide.
It's great to see Instagram taking active steps towards creating and fostering a safer, kinder experience by addressing the mental health, safety and well-being of their community.
If you want to talk to someone or are experiencing suicidal thoughts, text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
There’s some very cool stuff happening out there with virtual reality in education! I've covered some of these classroom VR experiences in other posts, but Welcome to Mars---a new VR program for schools, created by Lockheed Martin, is among the coolest!
“The first people who will visit Mars are sitting in a school today. In fact, the first astronauts will arrive before today’s kindergartners graduate college. To help inspire these students, Lockheed Martin created a one-of-a-kind virtual reality experience.
The Mars Experience Bus is the first immersive VR vehicle ever built and it replicates the Martian landscape. Riders experience a virtual drive along the surface of the Red Planet.”
“Perhaps our generation focused on information, but these kids focus on meaning -- how does information take on meaning?" - John Seeley Brown
Early in their seminal work on knowledge management and social learning--The Social Life of Information, John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid, point out that, “learning requires more than just information, but also the ability to engage in the practice.”
Brown/Duguid further illustrate the active nature of learning by outlining the (action-oriented) steps required for a “newbie” to effectively utilize, integrate, and understand a knowledge base existent within a Community of Practice (CoP) or learning community:
Become a member of a community
Engage in its practice
Acquire and make use of its knowledge
When learners fail to be actively “engaged in the practice” they will, in turn, be excluded from the “local topography” of the practice, as well as the opportunity to “understand the CoP from the inside out”—both of which are crucial in the transformation of information into meaning.
Actively Constructing Knowledge in Virtual Reality Learning Environments “Shifts in students’ learning style will prompt a shift to active construction of knowledge through mediated immersion.”-Chris Dede
Constructivist-based learning, according to Dr. Seymour Papert, “is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information 'poured' into their heads.”
Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, 3D modeling, virtual reality or robots)."
Technologies like virtual reality, especially for Gen Z students', provides avenues that allow them to engage in a social, collaborative, and active learning environment. The theory of constructivist-based learning is even more powerful when placed in a social and immersive context like that provided by virtual reality.
Virtual reality, especially when combined with storytelling, allows the student to participate in the story, develop empathy to experiences outside their current realm of understanding and allows them to be fully immersed in their own exploration and learning.
"The experience of participating in a story, as teller or audience, is typically that of being caught up in it while it is being told...Stories convey meaning about the social context and identity of the teller and audience. However, stories also have an effect on that identity and context." --John McLeod
How Irish Students Use VR in the Classroom “...students are eager and excited about the project, queuing outside the classroom door in the morning.” -St. Kieran Principal Esther Lambe
Students at St. Kieran’s, a school in the Irish town of Broughal, recently went on a field trip to Clonmacnoise, a nearby site with historic ruins. Nothing unusual or exceptional about that, right? This sort of thing happens in schools around the world, right? But wait--there’s more!
What makes this school field trip unusual is what the students did when they came back to the classroom. The students, part of a virtual reality pilot program in Irish schools, used the MissionV platform to create a virtual model of the Clonmacnoise in OpenSim and then viewed it using Oculus Rift headsets.
A key element of course design that is often overlooked: designing opportunities (both digital and analog) for students to create social bonds (through interaction) is equally as important as the course content or technology used in a project based learning activity. In this virtual Clonmacnoise example, these 10-12 year old students utilized both technology (maths, scripting, 3D modeling, programming), creative (archaeology, history, design) and social skills (project management, collaboration, face-to-face interaction) in a constructivist-based project to create a virtual reality experience.
“What it [VR] offers as a tool for creating worlds and experimenting with some of the ideas underpinning logic and programming that make it exciting — together with the incredible community of users and their creations.” -Tom Chatfield
In short, all learning is rooted in relationships. Not technology. Social interaction will continue to be at the heart of any effective constructivist-based or virtual learning environment. I'll explain more about how to use virtual reality as a pathway to learning in my next blog post.
One of the things I enjoy most about my work is having the opportunity to talk with parents, educators and brands to dispel some of the myths or fears around teen use of social media.
Tonight I’m going to be participating in a digital parenting Twitter chat hosted by Zabra that will be moderated by Josh Shipp.
The event starts at 7pm EST and you can participate through the hashtag #BeCyberAware. I hope you’ll join us for a lively and informative discussion.
No matter the audience, my message is pretty consistent: Don't panic! I'm frequently asked to share some of my favorite digital teens & parenting links, tips and other resources.
So here we go! I've sorted through my bookmarks and tweets and put together this (hopefully) handy handout. Feel free to tweet it or share it with anyone you think would find it helpful.
The CDC reports that 60 percent of high school students claim that they have though about committing suicide, and around nine percent of them say that they have tried killing themselves at least once.
Whatever the causes of teen suicide, it is important to note that the pressures of teenage living can lead to suicide. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL):
19.3 percent of high school students have seriously considered killing themselves.
14.5 percent of high school students made actual plans for committing suicide,
900,000 youth planned their suicides during an episode of major depression.
Many times parents may not know that their child is suffering from depression or suicidal thoughts. There are so many resources available for teens in crisis. Here are some organizations leading the charge to help teens in crisis.
It's important to have the discussion with your kids to let them know if they or one of their friends are suffering from depression or threatening to harm themselves they need to immediately tell an adult, teacher or direct them to one of these crisis providers. If they feel there is an eminent threat, call 911.
Today Facebook shared an Infographic that shows how people can quickly get suicide prevention resources and/or submit a report to Facebook about their distressed friend.
The three ways a person can get resources on Facebook desktop are:
Clicking “Report” on the upper-right corner of a post: in addition to resources and the option to submit a report, we also provide a suggested Facebook message for a person to send directly to their friend letting them know their concern.
Searching “Suicide” in the search bar.
Going to the Facebook Help Center and typing “suicide.”
On mobile, people can also report suicidal content in a post directly from their phone.
The World Health Organization reports that every year almost one million people die from suicide. That is tragic. And the impact goes much further—studies show that each suicide intimately affects at least 6 other people. That means that globally, the impact of suicide is felt deeply by many millions of people each year.
Please read and share this information with as many people as you can--you could literally save a life! You can also find a list of suicide prevention hotlines by clicking HERE.
This week Facebook rolled out a new feature--hashtags!
Similar to other services like
Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add
context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion.
Here's a new handout that covers the basics of getting started using hashtags on Facebook, along with a quick look at hashtag privacy. Feel free to share this, and our other (free!) Facebook Education handouts, with your colleagues, parents or youth pastor.
The Facebook
for Educators Guide is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese and
German. The guide is a collaboration between myself, Dr. BJ Fogg, Linda Fogg-Phillips and Facebook.
We invite you to join the conversation and share your best
practices for using social media in the classroom with educators from around
the world on our Facebook for Educators Page (http://www.facebook.com/FBforEducators).
I've teamed up again with my writing partner, Dr. Mercedes Fisher, to take a deeper look at how designing for social spaces can help foster a deeper sense of community among students, teachers and the course content.
But beyond the classroom, these best practices can be integrated into any online community, forum discussion or informal online education environment.
As web applications play a vital role in our society, social media has emerged as an important tool in the creation and exchange of user-generated content and social interaction. The benefits of these services have entered in the educational areas to become new means by which scholars communicate, collaborate and teach.
Social Media and the New Academic Environment: Pedagogical Challenges provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest research on social media the challenges in the educational context.
This book is essential for professionals aiming to improve their understanding of social media at different levels of education as well as researchers in the fields of e-learning, educational science and information and communication sciences and much more.
Earlier this week, Facebook launched a new initiative to augment its response to potentially suicidal members by offering them the opportunity for a private chat with a trained crisis representative from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
This service will be available to people who use Facebook in the United States and Canada.
The new service enables Facebook users to report a suicidal comment they see posted by a friend to Facebook using either the Report Suicidal Content link or the report links found throughout Facebook.
The person who posted the suicidal comment will then immediately receive an e-mail from Facebook encouraging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or to click on a link to begin a confidential chat session with a crisis worker.
Preventing suicide is everyone’s business. Nearly 100 Americans die by suicide every day, and in the past year, more than eight million Americans 18 or older had thought seriously about suicide.
Here's a free printable on this new program. Feel free to share it with teachers, parents, youth pastors or anyone else who works with youth.
In this infographic you can find out more about Facebook's security infrastructure and an overview of the tools available to all users to increase their level of account security.
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