Social media and its place in the classroom

Do you need to be wary about using social media in the classroom? Probably, but we argue that this should not be an impediment. You will ignore social media in the classroom at your peril. If you aren’t going to teach your students to communicate online, then they will do it themselves in their own way without valuable guidance from you. Is this desirable? No!

Social media is another tool that you can use to make your classroom more engaging, relevant and culturally diverse - making learning irresistibly engaging, attractive, seductive, pervasive and sophisticated for all.

Exciting times

There is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that teaching with Twitter creates a classroom of emboldened students. Students who are not outspoken in class seem to love the chance to make their voices heard without having to actually speak. Twitter encourages questions that may have never been asked by students who would not dare to ask them – a fantastic opportunity to change the dynamics of the classroom and engage many more students in personal and meaningful learning.

Social media is a common sense way to keep parents informed. Schools are always looking for ways to bring parents into the classroom and to include them in their child’s learning. This is not an easy task to achieve as parents are time poor and have plenty of other things to do. But believe us, parents are very interested in how things are progressing. Newsletters are fine but a bit impersonal and frankly “old hat”. Set up a blog, get some discipline going in posting to it, get the parents engaged in commenting on your posts and the sooner you know it you will have built another dimension into your teaching, and you, your students and their parents will be the richer for it. Quick, easy, interactive feedback is gold to a dedicated teacher.

School projects have grown a new life and brought new meaning because of social media. Kids can now create projects that are polished, vibrant, dynamic, interactive, and their learning shared with the world. Facebook is so much more than vapid status updates. Take for example a Facebook project where your students use Facebook to follow politicians. If your class is studying the current election, using Facebook to follow politicians on the local, state, and national scale brings a reality and authenticity to the lesson that far surpasses how you might have otherwise tackled the topic. You can even ask students to interact with the candidates, posting questions and getting feedback.

Pinning with Pinterest! This is an easy medium for your students to share likes and interests by posting or “pinning” to their own or others’ boards, images and videos usually with a common theme. This is a perfect way for them to dig deep, focus, explore, grow and refine an interest. This is the stuff of forming and feeding life-long passions and hobbies. This social network has a visual orientation which attracts another type of learner. It is very much focused on the concept of a person's lifestyle, allowing one to share tastes and interests with others and discovering those of likeminded people – quite a social and sophisticated learning experience for your students wouldn’t you agree?

With Google Hangouts kids communicate by video. Up to 10 people at one time can “hangout” in a virtual room. The experience can be as simple or as complex as needed by the task. All your students need is a Google account. Great for connecting classrooms. Imagine a group of primary students spread across different countries participating in a weekly book club meeting, to discuss the book that has been assigned for reading. This is a powerful opportunity for students to understand different cultural perspectives and build tolerance for difference in a world that surely needs it.

Emboldened students, greater parental participation, real authentic learning, awareness of passions and lifestyles and cultural perspective and tolerance – this is what social media offers!

What precautions do you need to take?

These examples of social media in action in the classroom are exciting, inspirational and have great educational potential. Let’s now turn to the things that should happen or should never happen!

When teaching with social media you will want to be confident that you have the privacy issues sorted. Train your students to check all privacy settings and have them articulate the implications of setting privacy settings in the way that they have chosen.

Also pay attention to assisting students to:

• Manage their passwords
• Always assume that everyone in the world will be able to see what they write even if the site limits their posts to friends exclusively – it is important that that they understand this standard for posting
• Be vigilant about cyber imposters
• Be responsible global citizens.

K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference

The K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference provides a fantastic opportunity to explore the digital technology terrain suitable for using in your teaching in your classroom, including using social media. You have an amazing choice!

If you are just getting started in teaching seriously with digital technology, or you have considerable expertise, you will walk away from this conference with great ideas to take up in your teaching.

A special feature of the conference is the spotlight on social media: the good; the bad; the must dos; and the never do!

The social media up for discussion include: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Google Hangouts, Edmodo, Blogs and Wikis, LinkedIn, Padlet, Voicethread, Podcasts.

Learn about using social media in your teaching, and be ready to share what you know.

Register for the K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference now at: www.ereg.me/k12dcp

The global rise of flipped learning and why flipping the class is the perfect answer for today’s educational climate

Classes globally are flipping

The rise of flipped learning globally is indisputable. Jon Bergmann, one of the pioneers of the Flipped Class Movement is leading the worldwide adoption of flipped learning by working with governments, schools, corporations, and education non-profits. Jon is coordinating or guiding flipped learning initiatives around the globe including China, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, the Middle East, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Canada, South America, and the United States.

In addition to Jon’s work, flipped learning projects mushroom in schools and other educational institutions all over the world. Take for example here in Australia in a project run at the University of Adelaide, the flipped classroom concept is being translated into practice in first year Health Sciences. In New Zealand, Kiwi classes are flipping. The Head of Department Social Studies at Waitakere College, is an advocate for flipped learning. He first saw the idea of the flipped classroom through Twitter. As he trawled through Twitter feeds watching clips on the flipped classroom idea, it suddenly dawned on him: ‘Why on earth haven’t I done this before?’ It made perfect sense and seemed simple to implement.” He is not alone. Just witness the growing mass of teachers globally who are on to this “good thing”.

Educational climate and pervasive digital technologies

Today’s educational climate is crying out for a pedagogical model like flipped learning.

Currently there is widespread dissatisfaction with poor learning outcomes. The global education community is pressuring for student centred learning environments. Schools are everywhere, thoroughly infused into society. Parents view schools as places for them to learn too. Teachers are everybody and they are everywhere.

Supporting this educational climate is an ambient, digital universe blessed with prevalent digital technology with the potential to make learning irresistibly engaging, attractive, seductive, pervasive and sophisticated for all. This is digital technology in the service of learning.

Taken together, the current educational climate and the prevalence of powerful digital technologies, have opened up an opportunity and niche for sound pedagogies to thrive, delivering improved learning outcomes and greater learning satisfaction. Flipped learning, one such pedagogy, has positioned itself well to take advantage of the demanding climate and pervasive digital resources. Flipped learning is about to make a powerful and arguably permanent mark on the education world stage.

Why flipping the class is the perfect answer

The concept of flipping is driven by answering two fundamental questions:

• Am I teaching to the group from the front far too much?
• Am I using my face-to-face time with my students well, befitting the trained professional teacher that I am?

When teachers begin to unpick and answer these two questions, their practice begins to change and the elements of good teaching come to the fore.

In the simplest of explanations flipped learning is essentially where the student absorbs the lesson at home and does the homework in class. The emphasis is shifted from a teacher-centred classroom to a student-centred learning environment. Flipped learning is making the best use of face to face class time. Flipped learning transfers the ownership of the learning to the learners and it personalises learning for all learners. The model gives teachers the time to explore deeper learning opportunities and pedagogies with their students. Learning not teaching is the centre of the classroom.

Technology is central to flipped learning. Identifying the right technology, the right technology providers and securing the necessary technical training are vital. Flipped learning takes advantage of the seductive and pervasive nature of digital technology.

In summary flipped learning meets most of the demands of today’s educational climate and stakeholder expectations for improving learning outcomes.

Jon Bergmann – flipped learning pioneer and FlipCon Masterclass

Jon Bergmann one of the pioneers of the flipped learning movement will be in Australia in October and November 2016. Why not come and learn from Jon at the FlipCon Masterclass day at the Gold Coast (Saturday 15 October) or Adelaide (Saturday 19 November)? The choice is yours!

Meet Jon and the other Masterclass leaders and hear briefly about their expertise and passion for flipped learning. Learn from global experts on flipped learning, why flipping the class is the perfect answer for today’s educational climate. Learn the four categories of technology necessary to flip your classroom, how to create flipped videos students will love, and get important tips on how to build in interactivity into your flipped lessons regardless of which technological tool you use. There is not just one way to flip a classroom.  Learn how teachers from all disciplines and all levels can flip their classes. And for those interested in flipping a school what are the best practices for bringing flipped learning to scale?  How do you bring key stakeholders into the picture?

Register for Gold Coast now at: www.ereg.me/FlipConGC/register or

Register for Adelaide now at: www.ereg.me/FlipConA/register

If you want something less intensive than the FlipCon Masterclass provides, then there are other FlipCon options for you, available at: www.flipconaus.com

Digital Leadership and Scaling Innovation

The Australian Digital Technologies Curriculum is a comprehensive and exciting challenge for school leaders. The Curriculum has been introduced as a means of preparing our students for a world that is increasingly digitised and automated.

Digital technologies provide students with opportunities to: 

• Use design thinking

• Be innovative developers of digital solutions and knowledge

• Become innovative creators of digital solutions

• Become effective users of digital systems 

• Become critical consumers of information conveyed by digital systems

• Engage in authentic learning challenges that foster curiosity, confidence, persistence, innovation, creativity, respect and cooperation

• Be regional and global citizens capable of actively and ethically communicating and collaborating.

School leaders have a great responsibility in developing a culture in their school that creates the environment for this critical learning to take place.

School leaders have two challenging tasks. First they must understand what is possible in digital teaching and learning. Secondly and most importantly they must take the next step of scaling up the fantastic innovations and creativity in teaching that they observe in their inspirational individual teachers – building an agenda for change and innovation that can have an enormous impact in a school.

How do you scale up to lead and innovate?

You really have to think about this and as a leader consciously work on it.

The trick to achieving sustainable change in schools is to learn how to scale innovation - how to take a great idea and have it reach every leader, teacher and student in the school.

Acknowledging the work of THNK (school of creative leadership) and the THNK community it is useful to think of scaling innovation by considering 3 main categories: Emergence, Networks and Waves. Keeping all 3 in mind as you seek to scale your innovations is definitely a sound idea.

Emergence is about keeping your eyes wide open for all the things that your teachers are doing as a collective. Hop onto it and as the good leader that you are, make sure that you design openness into the system and design rules for interaction, which allow successful behaviour to surface and spread.

Encourage (without stifling) target setting; emergence; and balancing control. Foster an ecosystem by bringing people in – expand to adjacencies, encourage the followers and engage the crowd. Experiment to improve and use the data to inform everyone how they are doing and keep moving forward.

Networks as a way of scaling innovation cannot be ignored.

Your job as an innovative leader is to take advantage of the properties of networks, the structures and technology supporting networks, and the social conditioning that exists with network members.

Networks have hubs and amplifiers – target them. If existing networks have gone to sleep, activate them. Encourage networks to jump across each other and infect each other with ideas. Aim to develop from this cross fertilisation, not another network, but a much larger coherent community and keep moving forward.

Emergence is a little like waiting to catch a wave. However the Wave category of innovation is not about that at all. It is about you taking the reins and exerting strong and powerful leadership.

The very powerful wave approach to innovation is about creating, nurturing and sustaining the wave and steering it in the direction of your entrepreneurial vison. You as the leader will unleash the wave, have others catch it, ride it and create a movement. You will synchronise all efforts and the wave will build to a crescendo always moving forward.

As we said at the beginning of this blog it is definitely a good idea to mesh all 3 approaches to scaling innovation.

For many years the Leading a Digital School Conference has been addressing the issue of how to scale innovation.

This is an invitation to attend the conference to add to your growing knowledge of what is possible with digital teaching and learning, and join the network of like-minded school leaders eager to take the best of the ideas presented and scale them up for the benefit of all students and teachers.

The conference is being held at the Crown Conference Centre, Melbourne on 25, 26 and 27 August 2016. Register now at: www.iwb.net.au/digital