Underage Children and Social Networking

Underage Children and Social Networking

Shalynn Weeden, Bethany Cooke and Michael McVey

In this article the authors aimed to determine if schools could have an impact on teaching social media safety to children and parents of children ages 7-12.  I found it very interesting that children as young as 9 years old have access to social media sites.  It also amazes me that parents and children are often unaware of how much access an unknown adult has to their children.  This further supports the case for earlier education about digital citizenship and online safety courses in schools.  The article also discusses how parents and other family members would benefit from such opportunities about online safety.  I do agree with the authors when they discuss that the age restrictions on most of the social networking websites are not much more than suggestions.  This makes it a priority to parents and educators to explain and understand the privacy settings of many of these websites, because children are going to join these websites.  If we do that, then at least students will be more aware of the dangers of social networking and hopefully aid them in making wise choices when engaging in them.

Growth as an Educator

What is one way in which you grew as an educator from this class and how will you continue it?

I feel like this class has help me develop my interpersonal skills when relating technology to my peers. This class has given me several tools to use when introducing and explaining technology to other teachers and why they should use it in their classrooms. The readings and assignments have been very insightful on the potential of technology use in the classroom. I believe these skills will help me in my efforts to help other teachers integrate technology into their classrooms.

What I learned from the OR Project

Did you learn about your teaching style in the OR project? - Discuss your teaching strengths and weaknesses from this on blog.


While teaching my OR project to a fellow teacher at my school I found out that I did have a specific teaching style that I have grown accustomed to over the past year. I have been a very big advocate of the flipped classroom at my school, so in similar fashion I flipped my OR project. I compiled many video resources describing the technology I had chosen to teach, the Google Drive app for the iPad. I also made a screencast of myself doing a walk-through of all the major features of the app as well as how to setup the app for collaboration in the classroom. One of the strong points about teaching a technology in this way is that the person learning the technology can go back at any time and re-learn the material in the videos, it is no longer a one-stop-shop. One of the weakness however is the amount of time it takes to watch an instructional video about a topic, I found problem out from teaching my students this year. In making an instructional video you must take into account the person watching the video and how often they must pause the video and take notes for example. This can make an 10 minute video turn into a 20 minute video very easily. This makes it very important to limit the amount of material presented in a single screencast. I tried to limit myself in the video I made for the project; however it turned out to be a little over 12 minutes in length.

Professional Development Post

Share one of your Personal Professional Development goals by 3/28 - respond to someone else's by 4/2 with suggestions.

V.  Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership:

Teachers continuously improve their professional practice, model lifelong learning, and exhibit leadership in their school and professional community by promoting and demonstrating the effective use of digital tools and resources.

·      Current Skills: I am currently a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma.  The masters’ degree that I am pursuing is in the College of Education’s Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology program with emphasis on teaching with technology.  I am also very active with professional development.  In my five years of teaching I have attended several AP workshops for chemistry, with the most recent being focused on digital technology use in the chemistry classroom.  I attended the National Flipped Education Conference in the summer of 2012 and have given two professional development talks about the flipped classroom to the teachers in my district. 

·      Need: I believe education can no longer be a one-person show.  Teachers must learn to effectively communicate with each other if we plan to increase the levels of student collaboration.  The field of education is changing everyday and new mandates are being added all of the time.  For a teacher to remain caught up with the changing times they must take their professional development into their own hands. 

·      Goal: It is my goal to renew my ISTE membership at the end of the school year and register for the ISTE conference or FlipCon (Flipped Classroom Conference) in the summer of 2014.  I would also like to prepare a session to submit for consideration about the experiences I have had using the flipped classroom model and iPads in the classroom.    

·      Measure: I plan to renew my membership with ISTE as well as register for one of the two conferences listed above.  I also plan to create a presentation to submit for approval to one or both of these conferences. 

·      Short-Term Plan: By the end of the school year or by the start of the next I will renew my membership to ISTE. 

·      Long-Term Plan: Over the course of the next school year I will figure out the conference dates of both conferences and decide which is best.  I will then apply for funding through the school or save the money myself.  I will also work on a presentation idea for the conference and have it ready to be submitted by December 2013. 

    Assessment: I will have reached my goals if by the summer of 2014 I still a member of ISTE and am attending either the ISTE conference or FlipCon, giving a presentation over my flipped classroom.

Update on Teaching Project

What is your status on your technology teaching projects -update me on your blog - What has suprised you so far?

I have just started to work on my Teach Someone a Technology Project. Over spring break I worked on finishing my Professional Development Project and had a Skype call with Dr. Cullen over my final project. I decided to do my final project over teaching someone how to use the Google Drive App for the iPad. I have been reading many great things about how great the update has been for the App. I have been messing around with it myself the last couple of days and found that it is a great collaboration tool to use with students if you have access to a class set of iPads. With the recent push for more collaboration with the shift to Common Core, I was planning on teaching this technology to one of the English teachers that I share ideas with on a regular basis. Currently I am in the process of gathering resources and putting together handouts and videos explaining cloud computing and the google drive app. Hopefully in the within the next week I will have a chance to sit down with him and teach him the technology because we are both very busy with track and baseball.

Ertmer & Leftwich Article

"Teacher Technology Change: How Knowledge, Confidence, Beliefs, and Culture Intersect

This journal article brings up some very good points about what is expected from teachers and students in regards to using technology to facilitate learning.  One of the main problems that it points out is that our students are simply not being prepared for the highly technical world that we are living in today.  This fall in large part on the education system and more so on the teachers.  The article gives statistical evidence that teachers are using technology more; however, they are not using it to help students "facilitate learning."  Most are using it for administrative tasks and student activities that require little collaboration and interaction.  From this the article points out that, "we need to help teachers understand how to use technology to facilitate meaningful learning, defined as that which enables students to construct deep and connected knowledge, which can be applied to real situations" (Ertmer, 2010).  The Purpose of the paper is taking a closer look at technology change through the eyes of the teacher.  It investigates the necessary characteristics and qualities that teachers need to enable them to make a change that introduces meaningful technology experiences.  It then explains how schools can support teachers as they try to integrate technology.  Some of the things that the authors point out to help aid in teacher change are overall knowledge of technology and how much confidence teachers have in themselves to facilitate student learning with technology (self-efficacy).  Teachers beliefs or expectations also play a big roll in technology integration.  School culture also influences technology integration, based on the importance placed on it by the school as a whole.  The article then concludes by addressing the factors that affect teacher change and how programs can facilitate a change in teaching.  It address two approaches that address the factors above, one is during teacher education programs at the university level and the other is during professional development programs at the school level.

This article got me thinking about how I started integrating technology into my classroom.  At the university level, my pre-service training included very little practice on the "how to" involved with technology integration.  We learned of different tools, however most of my methods classes were still modeled after and catered to the students of the past.  When I graduated and started teacher, my first couple of years I was mainly a lecturer with some studented centered labs and activities but I found myself wanting more and observed that not all of my students were being services.  The students were not getting out of the material what I knew they needed to.  The past couple of years I started to look for more ways to make chemistry relevant to high school students, this is when I came upon the Flipped Classroom model.  My school was very supportive of my shift to use technology and I considered myself very knowledgable when working with technology.  This meant my self-efficacy was very high and I knew I could figure out a way to work through the problems.  I also believed that my students were being better served by using more technology for meaningful interactions.  However, my school culture is starting to change to a more technology friendly environment as far as equipment and teacher training.  Mostly this has been due to teachers trying to find better ways to reach students and the district providing resources for the teachers to be successful.  I just hope the enthusiasm continues after the "newness" wears off.

Sandholtz Chapter 5

Sandholtz Chapter 5: Redefining Student and Teacher Roles

Chapter 5 focused on the role shifts of the teacher and student in a technology rich classroom.  It followed the movement of the classrooms from a teacher-focused environment to more student-focused one.  Students began to take on different roles including experts and peer tutors, not only in content, but also in technology.  Students began to help other students with technology problems and even helped the teacher learn new things about the technology.  Some of the teacher were apprehensive about letting  the students have this much control; however, once they saw the benefits, they realized that this type of collaborative learning helped to reach every student in the classroom.  Many of these teachers reorganized their classrooms to facilitate more collaborative interactions.  The remainder of the chapter discusses some considerations that must be taken into account when changing the roles of the classroom.  For instance, having not only advanced students act as experts, but also low achieving students, which acts to increase their self-esteem.  They also point out that students should be allowed to not only share their expertise with peers, but also parents, teachers and administrators.

This chapter is very helpful to me, because I am always looking for ways to increase student collaboration in my classroom.  My flipped classroom model already lends itself to being more student-centered, however I find myself always looking for more student collaboration, in particularly using technology to do so.  I love the idea of student roles as experts and peer tutors.  I think I am going to try this in my class next unit, because it has been very hard to have meaningful peer interaction when I am letting students pick their own groups.  Perhaps if I assign a groups, with each group having a peer tutor or "expert" I can always make sure that every group has someone there to answer questions when I am not around.