Social Media Literacy

The first day of my training as a 2015 Teach for America corps member stands out to me because of one thought I had over and over that day, "When did people started using computers so much?" Everyone around me had a laptop on the table, except me. I had graduated college in 2007, worked overseas, and had only been back in the country for just under a year. In about eight years, students had apparently stopped using a notebook and pen to write notes and jot ideas, apparently opting for a laptop. Honestly, I didn't understand it. A notebook and pen are so much lighter and easier to carry around than a laptop. Plus, who doesn't like new pens?
The world had changed so much in less than ten years. Now, as a teacher in Chicago, I am baffled by how connected my middle school students are at every possible moment and simultaneously baffled by how little is said to my students about social media literacy.

In Attention and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies, author Howard Rheingold explains five social media literacies that all people, especially students, should understand.

Attention

https://me.me/t/pay-attention-meme

Rheingold's first aspect of social media literacy is attention. He discusses how difficult it can be as an educator to engage students in a lesson. To help his students feel present and attentive, Rheingold would ask the students to be still and quiet, setting aside distracting forms of technology. Through this activity, he hopes his students will begin an "internal observation" instead of viewing the world externally through devices (18). 

I love this practice. In my own classroom, I lead my students through a guided meditation on Fridays. Rheingold's description of his own experience has inspired me. Instead of always guiding my students through a silent meditation, timing the students for one minute while they are still, quiet, and without distractions, could be more powerful. My students, like Rheingold's, are so attached to devices, especially cell phones, that five minutes without them seems to be torture. Practicing a minute free of distractions could help the students realize their own attachment, even addiction, to technology and how that technology interrupts their time looking inward.

Participation

memegenerator.net

Though students using technology in the classroom can be distracting if the student is using it inappropriately, Rheingold argues, "The technologies that we have in our pockets today are powerful engines for participation." Today, teachers can use technological tools to enhance their lessons and increase engagement. Most students want to be looking at their phones. Implementing smart phones and other forms of highly engaging technology can increase the participation in the classroom as students are easily drawn into this familiar and fun device.

Find some great websites to use in the classroom to increase the participation here.

Collaboration

https://rampages.us/

Collaboration might be more important now than ever. Rheingold describes the 2006 "Penguin Revolution" in Chile, during which secondary school students walked out of school as a means of protest in favor of education reform. Thanks to efforts via social media, more than 800,000 students participated in this event as the information had been shared time and time again through texts and on YouTube (20).

This example of collaborative efforts by students strikes me particularly hard days following a nation-wide student protest in favor of sensible gun reform. After the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 24, 2018, high school students have rallied together to organize protests across the country and to post videos about their beliefs about gun reform. Without social media, these events would be relatively small, and information about them would have to be passed along mostly verbally. Having access to social media provides an opportunity for students, and others, to work together.

Network Awareness

Instead of talking directly to someone as people did in the past, social media allows us to build relationships with countless people from all around the world. Every person on social media has built a network of people. Rheingold states, "Whether you look at the issue as a citizen, an entrepreneur, a scientist, a journalist, or a cultural producer, what you know or don’t know about how networks work can influence how much freedom, wealth, and participation you will have in the rest of this century." We should all be aware of who we let into our network, he continues, and be questioning who we should let take up our time, energy, and thoughts, and why (22). This lesson is especially important to middle school students like mine, who are already trying to figure out who and what should be taking up their emotional energy.

Critical Consumption

With all the information available online, it's hard to determine who or what to trust. Teaching students to be critical of what they see online can be incredibly valuable. Everyday at the beginning of each class, my students and I discuss the news. More and more often, I've been trying to display news articles online so we can discuss them together. I plan to start showing fake news articles, too, in order to teach my students to be critical of what they're seeing on the internet and to analyze and check all the information.



While so many schools seem to be pushing against technology because it can be distracting to students in the classroom, Rheingold's descriptions of the five social media literacies provides inspiration for teachable moments. The internet and social media can provide interesting ways to engage students and to teach them critical thinking skills.

Rheingold, Howard. "Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies."  2010. file:///home/chronos/u-7e4ec29437ed7009528e3c080f337c38602d5a5c/Downloads/Rheingold-Attention%20and%20Social%20Media%20Literacies.pdf

CIPA and COPPA: Keeping Students Safe Online

COPPA

COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, was created to protect the privacy of kids under 13 years of age. It gives parents/guardians the ability to control what online information is shared or collected about their children under 13. In other words, websites aren't allowed to collect or save information about children, including their school name, home address, or anything else that could identify the location of the child.

To learn more about COPPA, check out the resources below:

1 FCC: Children's Privacy

2 Anna Otto via YouTube:

3 Morse, Barnes-Brown and Pendleton via YouTube:

4 Huffington Post: 5 Things Parents Should Know about COPPA

CIPA

CIPA, the Children's Internet Protection Act, is another law created to protect children online. CIPA requires all libraries and K-12 schools to follow safety guidelines in order to acquire discounted internet access from the government. This means schools and libraries need to have internet filters in place to protect children from accessing websites that are too mature for them.

To learn more about CIPA, check out the following resources:

1 FCC: CIPA

2 SimpleK12 via YouTube:

Both COPPA and CIPA were created to ensure the privacy of children. However, before this week in EDU 790, I had never heard of either. To be fully effective, there should be more discussion in schools about these laws so that we can help enforce the ideas of privacy and safety to our students.

Seen by Everyone for Your Whole Life Forever

As a middle school teacher, I feel like I spend more time on my students' social-emotional concerns than I do on actually teaching about history. I have students in my room every day, upset about something happening in their lives. Nine times out of ten, whatever is upsetting them has some connection to the internet. Someone said something in a group chat that turned it into a group argument. My student posted something "private" that was shared over and over again. In every case, my student will seem baffled that something they thought wouldn't be shared was shared. "Of course it was shared!" I want to shout. But I don't. Or I try not to. I usually tell them something like, "Assume that everything you post or share will be seen by everyone for your whole life forever."

When I got a Facebook account, I was in college. At the time, Facebook was only for college students. Oh what a simple time it was. Over ten years later, I'm adding to my digital tattoo every day, especially on Facebook. I share many things every day but post my own updates infrequently. To better understand how others see me via my digital tattoo, I scrolled through some of my posts and shares. I saw many reoccurring themes.

Using Adobe Stock Images, I created a collage of images that represent those things:

Collage created by the author

I learned that on Facebook I post about my dog more than I post about anything else, with funny things my students say coming in a close second. I share political posts a lot, but I'm usually only sharing things that already reflect my beliefs to an audience that mostly agrees with my beliefs. On my Instagram account, okay I'm still mostly posting about my dog. Pictures from my life in Chicago come in third place while pictures of my vegetarian creations come in second.

Our digital tattoos are like so many physical tattoos. You start with something small and then keep adding to it until you have something covering half your body. For the most part, I think it's interesting to see what my friends and family are posting, not only because these things are often thought provoking but also because it tells me a little more about who they are and how they want to be viewed by others. Sometimes, though, this idea of being connected online can seem a little too extreme for me. For example, in this article "From the Designers of Fitbit, a Digital Tattoo Implanted Under Your Skin" Mark Wilson explains Project Underskin, "a concept for a smart digital tattoo which would be implanted in your hand and interact with everything you touch. In can unlock your front door, trade data with a handshake, or even tell you if you have low blood sugar." It's possible that one of my students will become a teacher someday, too. Maybe he/she will have students walking into the classroom every morning, complaining that they shared too much via handshake!

Our digital tattoos, like our real tattoos, are forever. Whatever we share will follow us wherever we go and will give others an idea of who we are and what we believe. They're here to stay. And like our real tattoos, they tend to get larger and more detailed over time.

No Dinosaurs Here

When I told my middle school students that I remember not having a computer, they didn't seem as surprised as I'd expected.
"My auntie doesn't have a computer either," one student told the class.
"That's not that weird," another student agreed, "I mean, you had an iPhone so probably you didn't need one that much."
I was about to shock them. "Actually, I didn't have an iPhone until I was about 27. That was only about five years ago. In fact, I remember not having the internet at all."
Stunned silence.
"Yeah, you would just be reading a book and then turn and see a dinosaur pass by your window!" exclaimed one of the sillier students in the class.
We all laughed.

When the internet took off, I knew I was a witness to a big moment in history. I imagined being an old woman telling stories of Y2K and the creation of the internet. I didn't realize that I'd be baffling my students with these stories at the age of 32.

My students don't know a world without the internet. It is so ingrained in their everyday lives that they can barely get through one 45-minute class without checking their Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook accounts. Imagining a world where they couldn't constantly connect is unthinkable to them.

According to the Office of Adolescent Health, 94% of teenagers use their mobile devices to access the internet on a daily basis and 71% of teenagers are connected to multiple social media sites.

Office of Adolescent Health

According to these statistics, the internet plays an important part of my students' lives. However, my own use of technology in the classroom is limited. My students don't have one-to-one technology, and they aren't allowed to have their cell phones in class. The only technology we have available is my Smart Board. However, 53% of students prefer classes that use technology as a way of learning, according to Rhea Kelly from Campus Technology. 

Campus Technology

According to this study, technology has helped students be engaged in the content and has improved their grades. While I'm not incredibly surprised that students find technology helpful, I am surprised to find how high these percentages are. For example, Kelly claims "82 percent of students said they use laptops for homework assignments, compared to 59 percent using print materials." I so rarely give homework assignments that require technology because several of my students don't have access to computers at home. In every grade of my K-12 charter, teachers are struggling to get students to turn in assignments. If Kelly's statistic is correct, we might have a higher rate of homework completion if more assignments were computer-based. Certainly, my school would then have to provide one-to-one technology to make this requirement equitable. While that would be costly, the payoff of improved engagement, improved grades, and potentially improved test scores would be huge.

These studies strike me as particularly interesting as my school and certainly many others seem to be in a strange dance with students' access to technology. While we have computer classes at the school that teach basic computer skills, those classes are only twice per week for most students. Increasing the availability and usage of technology in the classrooms would benefit the majority of students, if the statistics from Kelly's study are accurate. Of course some students may be distracted and want to access social media to communicate with friends instead of engaging with the content, but it would seem that the majority of students would find the use of technology beneficial. If the trend of internet usage continues, the next generation of students I teach will be even more connected than my current students. Technology will play a bigger role in their lives. Embracing technology and teaching students helpful ways to use the internet and think critically about what they're reading on social media could be incredibly valuable to them later in life.