Digital Technology - Social Media Apps

My digital technology journey continued this week into social media apps and discovering different roles they can play in education. I looked at Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I found they each have pros and cons, but if used safely and effectively, they can be an excellent tool in collaboration and sharing ideas and resources.

Facebook is a social media app that I am familiar with.  I searched school libraries and the list included school library groups, journals, connections, rules, and a few school libraries pages. I looked at the ways school libraries are utilizing Facebook as well as the advantages and disadvantages.  From what I saw with the school library pages for Victoria West High School, Lamar Middle School, and Atascocita Middle School, Facebook can be used to share information about upcoming events, photos of events that have taken place, book reviews and recommendations, district information, videos, or anything else relevant to the school or district.

Facebook is easy to use, familiar, and informative. However, it is not as popular with students as it is with parents. When I asked some of my students about using Facebook, 6^th graders, most of their responses were, “My mom or grandma use it” or “That’s for old people.” Facebook would be good for keeping parents informed but I do not feel that it would reach many of the students. Another negative with Facebook that I found while looking at the school library pages was that not all of them kept up with it and stayed current. One of the school libraries pages, that didn’t have very many recent posts and few comments, had only 50 followers, while another, which shared a lot of great information and included multiple posts daily had over 300 followers. The school with the fewer followers has more students than the one with over 300 followers. This showed me that if the information is not relevant to what is going on at the time, people will lose interest and not follow the school’s library page.

If you are going to have a Facebook page for a school library, I believe it needs to stay updated and share information that will interest the audience.  I feel that it would be a useful tool for keeping parents informed but should not be the only social media app that the library uses. The library will need to also share information using an app used more widely by students.

Twitter is another social media app that I explored. It is more widely used by younger individuals and is a quick and easy way to share information using 140 characters or less. The limited number of characters can be considered a negative for some, but for teenagers, it seems to be what they prefer over Facebook.

I spent some time following several individuals that are well known for their role with educational technology. Kathy Schrock, @KathySchrock, an Educational Technologist shared links to her blog posts, updates on some educational technology apps that have recently taken place, and reviews on different educational apps. One of her tweets that I liked and looked into was a link to indiegogo.com and an app that they have, Secret Agent Mia’s Book Club. This interactive app uses artificial intelligence to help struggling readers. Kathy Schrock's 

Take a look at this Indiegogo crowd-sourcing project using AI to support struggling readers. This could be a model for future ways AI could meaningfully support teaching and learning! https://t.co/8xmvzT60HJ

— Kathy Schrock (@kathyschrock) July 30, 2019

Linda Braun, @lbraun2000, is another person I started following on Twitter. She is an educator, librarian, and a learning consultant, as well as a former president of YALSA.  Her Twitter feed consists of links to interesting articles. One of the articles addresses the need for more career opportunities for students after high school through hands on learning and training. The article explains how teaching students marketable skills while in high school will help them in finding a job upon graduation.  

“The traditional study-then-work approach is letting too many students down. With a study-and-work approach, we can create more opportunities for more students beyond high school.” https://t.co/p0k4xmLXFp

— Linda W Braun (@lbraun2000) August 22, 2019

She also included upcoming events like the YALSA Symposium, webinars for educators, and shared tweets from @MindShift, the Twitter page for a podcast about exploring the future of learning.

Alan November, @globalearner, Founder of November Learning and author of Who Owns the Learning? shared tweets that made me think. He hasn’t tweeted much in a while. Most of them dated back to 2018 or before, but several of the one’s I did see included his thoughts and quotes. He reminds me of a wise man or the Yoda of Learning and questioning. His tweets stress the importance of asking questions during the learning process. One of his wise tweets pertaining to this that stuck out to me is shared below.

imaginative, creative questions are the lifeblood of understanding. Prompt your students to ask questions before content is provided to create a safe space for taking the risk of asking questions.

— Alan November (@globalearner) August 29, 2019

Gwyneth Jones, @GwynethJones, is known as The Daring Librarian. She is a teacher librarian, as well as an international speaker on educational technology. Her various social media outlets are followed by many. Her recent tweets include free downloadable resources for back-to-school, retweets of new books she is planning on reading, an article on 7 steps to a digital detox, a link to a video that explains how to use the Quik app to create a video and information, as well as information on the show, British Bake Off. She also tweets about updates for technology and apps, including Kahoot.

NEW! "@GetKahoot has some cool updates including a question bank, more characters, slides, polls, autosave & more to engage and assess learners!" Via @ShellTerrellhttps://t.co/H8tfGlHLAf#EdChat #TLChat #FutureReadyLibs pic.twitter.com/LS9LHuvpIz

— Gwyneth Jones (@GwynethJones) August 26, 2019

The way she presents herself and the information she tweets shows she is excited about technology and learning as well as sharing new ideas and resources that can benefit teachers and librarians. I really enjoyed looking at her tweets and look forward to following her on Twitter, as well as her blog, The Daring Librarian.

Jim Lerman’s, @jimlerman, Twitter feed is another great resource to follow. He is known as the Architect of Ideas. He compiles all of the articles he tweets into his Scoop.it page and shares the links on his Twitter feed. Lerman had several interesting tweets that I came across including one about Projects vs. Project-based learning.

Are You Using Projects or Project-Based Learning | Education Closet https://t.co/EQGljaWpQL pic.twitter.com/123L4kGIaC

— Jim Lerman (@jimlerman) August 30, 2019

He also had another interesting tweet that gave ideas on how educators can create a more innovative classroom.

10 Ways Educators Can Make Classrooms More Innovative https://t.co/bvnybeLo4S pic.twitter.com/RF8jtoIaFe

— Jim Lerman (@jimlerman) August 31, 2019

I found his Twitter feed to be very informative including back-to-school apps for lesson planning, tips for making classroom walk-throughs more powerful, classroom management tips, and setting up a student-centered classroom environment. Everything I read was all very helpful and included useful information I want to share with my colleagues. 

The third social media app I looked into as a source for sharing information with students, parents, faculty and staff is Instagram. Instagram allows you to share images and videos. You can create a story that changes from one image to the next and you can also download additional apps to add text, filters, and icons to your photos then post them on Instagram.

Instagram can be a very useful tool for school libraries. You can display student work, share images of new books added to the library’s collection, have students take pictures of the process or steps they took to complete an experiment or project, and share pictures from fun library events and new library displays. There are many uses for Instagram and it seems to be popular with students, making it a good tool to reach the younger audience.

I created my own Instagram account and played around with it.  I also downloaded an Overgram app that allowed me to add text and use filters on pictures. I posted a couple images of my classroom as well as started my story. Feel free to check it out at lanasnow36.

After looking at all three social media apps including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, I feel that Facebook is great for reaching the parents, teachers, faculty, staff, and community. Mostly adults have Facebook accounts and would follow what is happening using this social media app. To reach the younger audience, or students, Twitter and Instagram would be great tools to achieve that. Twitter is a great way to get information out to students quickly and that they would be more likely to follow what is happening at the library, on Twitter, then Facebook.  As for Instagram, I also believe that it alone would not work very well because of it focusing on images and videos and not on text. However, using it in conjunction with Twitter, to reach students, could be beneficial to the library as well as to the students.

There are many pros or positives when it comes to school libraries using social media apps. For example, information about the library, school, and community is able to be shared to a large audience in a short amount of time. Also, with the number of students using technology to stay in contact with their peers, it is a great tool to share information with them, since they are on it anyway. However, there are a couple negatives to keep in mind. First off, I did not find a “one-size-fits-all” social media app that everyone, both adults and students, use or are familiar with.  Therefore, to use social media effectively, a school library will need to have more than one social media outlet to reach audiences of all ages. The second negative and the one that strands out the most to me is online safety. Security and privacy are very important. To overcome this, I believe that with the right privacy settings and active monitoring, a district, school, and librarian should be able to maintain a student’s online safety.

I hope my journey this week through digital technology and social media apps was helpful. All three of the social media apps I looked at had its advantages and disadvantages, but together they can work really well for a school library. My personal opinion would be to use Facebook and Twitter together. I feel that I would be able to reach my audience using those two apps. I also like Instagram, but I see that more for personal use.