The Benefits of using Social Networking Sites
Being a technology teacher, my need for improvement formed out of one of the classes I teach, which was computer literacy. At my school, the computer literacy schedule is on an A/B day schedule. I essentially have an A day set of students and a B day set of students. The students are in P.E. when they are not with me. I noticed through observation that since the students don’t have my computer lit class every day, they were more late work assignments being turned in. Also, I wasn’t happy with the way that I was giving feedback to the students. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to give feedback at all and other times I was just able to walk behind their computer screen and give feedback directly to them, which wasn’t very private. Through reflection and observations, I wanted to find a way to decrease late work assignments and find an effective means for giving feedback to my students.
Knowing what the need was, I now needed to formulate a plan or a vision. Before the school year started, my technology coordinator was talking to us about teacher-student social networking sites and how we were going to use this site for one of our computer literacy projects. After exploring the site for a few weeks, I learned that this would be a perfect solution for my need. This site would allow for students to turn in their work anywhere with an Internet connection and it would allow me to provide one on one effective feedback to my students. After I knew what tool I was going to use, my vision became to use the teacher-student social networking site to decrease late work turned in by providing a more efficient means for turning in work and to effectively provide feedback. Also, with seeing the students every other day and dealing with absences, I had at least one or two late assignments per assignment. Therefore, a goal attached to the vision was to only have three late assignments per six weeks for all my classes.
With only receiving feedback and permission to conduct the research, I was the only one involved in making the decision to do the action research. However, before coming up with the idea of using the teacher-student social networking site, I asked several different teachers their methods for decreasing late work and providing effective feedback, but it either didn’t fit my computer environment or I didn’t have the time. After hearing about implementing this new website for a project we were doing in one of our tech classes, I did further research about it and decided to use the social networking site Edmodo. I read articles such as “Edmodo Best Practices” and “School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010.” The first article describes the students being able to take ownership of the group. Instead of the teaching leading most of the teaching and discussing, the students get to have more of a role in that area. Online social networking can also “connect students with real- life learning” ( 21). For example, I could invite a doctor to join a class discussion through Edmodo for students to interact with. In addition, collaboration is a real-life learning skill. After reading several of these articles and best practices, I knew that using Edmodo could prove to be the answer to the conflict.
After coming up with the vision, I primarily communicated the vision with my administrator. My administrator gave me feedback and helped me fine tune the action research plan. There wasn’t any initial need to communicate the vision with parents, community members, or other faculty members because it didn’t necessarily involve them. However, I did share my vision with the students. I told my students that I had been observing more frequent late assignments being turned in and that I wasn’t happy with the feedback I was giving them. I also quickly did a survey on whether or not the students felt like they were receiving feedback. When introducing the site with the vision, the kids were excited. After this next full year of piloting the site and the research, I plan on sharing the vision and the results of the research with parents and other faculty members.
Since the website was designed for teacher-student collaboration, implementing the project primarily involved the students and me. The majority of the responsibilities fell on me because I had to put in the time to set up the site, make sure updated content was on the site, provide feedback for every assignment, and monitor the chat among students. The site was free, which was an added bonus to the project. The most difficult responsibility to fulfill was all the time I had to put into the project, which turned out to be manageable now that I’m comfortable with the site. Before venturing out on this website, I made sure that this site was secure for students. For example, students do not need an email address to register. Students cannot chat privately one on one. Students can only chat with classmates in the class, which goes out to everyone. Every time a student sends a comment, I get an email. Also, to ensure student learning, there are guidelines the students must follow in order to keep the privilege of using the site. For example, all comments must be school related. I made it perfectly clear that this website was a privilege and that its intended use was to be a tool for them to use to collaborate with each other and the teacher for help or guidance.
Additionally, I used the needs assessment and data to guide the operations of my research plan and to set priorities. My top two priorities were to provide effective feedback and to decrease late assignments. When posting assignments on the website, there was a quick taskbar on the top right of each student’s homepage. On the taskbar, it listed all upcoming assignments and due dates. It would also alert you if a big announcement was made. The taskbar played an important role in the organization of the students’ computer lit assignments and in turn, decreased late work assignments. Furthermore, due to the large number of students I had in class, I would only provide feedback to students who did not receive a 100 on their work. This was also due to the amount of time I had to provide feedback and post grades.
This website can benefit both special needs students and exceptional needs students. For the special needs students, they can collaborate with their classmates and teacher for extra help. As the teacher, I can post special resource handouts to specific kids only and I can provide help anytime I’m on the internet and on the website. For my students with exception needs, they can be the students who help the students who don’t understand something. In turn, they get to be the teacher and post helpful comments to those who are having difficulty, which demonstrates a higher form of learning. In addition to all the main features that I wanted out of the social networking site, Edmodo can also help teach life skills such as organization and time management. With the calendar, spotlight, and bolded headlines, all the students are learning how to manage their workload in my class, which they can transfer these skills over into their other classes. Overall, I believe this website will provide exceptional results for my research and increase learning for all students.
Bibliography
Edmodo Best Practices. (n.d.). Retrieved July 29, 2011, from Edmodo Teacher Hub: http://edmodoteacherhub.wikispaces.com/Best+Practices
School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010. (2010). Retrieved July 29, 2011, from edweb: http://www.edweb.net/fimages/op/PrincipalsandSocialNetworkingReport.pdf
