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.