I remember when I first started attending high school and I really wanted to have an email account and MSN messenger because I was meeting a lot of new friends and they all seemed to have it. I asked my mom one night and she said that I was not old enough. I remember the next day making an account at the school library and hiding it from her for 6 months until one day she said I could get an account and I acted like I had just made it then and there. I never did get an answer to why I couldn’t have an account and I think that I ended up
getting one because of a lack of an explanation of why not. Yes there are risks of being online but at the same time if we teach kids about these risks then they will have the smarts not to get into anything they shouldn’t.
                 
One of my big things with kids being online – and this is my own personal opinion – is that a child can get a facebook or twitter account once they have reached the minimum age but until the child can prove save behaviours for a certain amount of time, the parents should have access to the password.  With my students this year I am using an online password protected websites that sends the email that is registered for a certain individual notices every so often depending on the settings. With this classroom I explained to the parents that it was a protected area, I had access to everything and each student who wanted to be a part of it had to sign 
a consent form stating how they were to conduct their behaviour online and that cyberbullying of any form was absolutely not acceptable. Another big thing that I had with the parents is I allowed the parents to decide what email was to be used to sign up with my course – theirs or their child’s. All of my parents have used their email except for one and that is mostly because the parents both work and if something went wrong with the inability to log in or a password reset, their child could still access the information needed. Also, I do not think many of my students have their own emails as they are mostly 12 and 13 years old and for some companies (such as Facebook) you have to be 13 before you can have your own account.
                 
I am still trying to figure out how I would use social media with my students. I know how to keep everything safe while using Canvas and I think that is why I have not ventured from that yet, I am staying where I am safe until I
know more to use the next type of (less protected) social media as safely as possible. I have stated before that I am trying to become less of an ‘ostrich’ and a quote from the Forbes technopanic reading struck me. “[if] everything is viewed as a risk, then nothing is a risk. Fear-based tactics and inflated threat scenarios can lead to situations where individuals and society ignore quite serious risks because they are overshadowed by unnecessary panics over non-problems.” I want to move away from seeing everything at a risk and turn from ‘ostrich’ to ‘eagle’ and I really hope that over the coming weeks this will be possible.
 
 
References:
 Thierer, A. (2012) The six things that  drive 'technopanics'. Forbes.com http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamthierer/2012/03/04/the-six-things-that-drive-technopanics/ 


 
 

Until starting my readings on this topic I had never heard of the phrase ‘digital divide’. I know from my past practicum experiences that there was a correlation between high needs / low income schools and the lack of technology not only in the schools but also at home compared to the low needs / high income schools with an abundance of technology at the school and home fronts. I think it was very naive of me to think that everyone
is equal and because we all live in North America, and especially BC, we all have internet, don’t we? And then I saw the map.
            
Julia posted a link to a map (found here: http://www.pathwaystotechnology.ca/interactive-map/mapviz?viz=MAP&q=select+col2+from+2352792+&h=false&lat=54.57158764474383&lng=-126.55798400000003&z=5&t=1&l=col2) that showed just how many Aboriginal communities just on our island, let alone the rest of BC or even Canada, that are not connected to the internet or health care. When first reading the map I was very confused and even now I am not completely sure that I am reading it correctly. If I am, there are five ‘Vancouver Island Health Authority” catchment regions that do not have access to health care or internet and another five that have no high speed internet access. With wifi being what it is now, you would think that everyone would have internet access but again, that is a testament to my naivety.
                 
When looking at the stats for US households with internet access, I am amazed at what is shown. I have noticed that the stats are five years old so it would interesting to see what they are like now but I am sure the ratios will probably be the same. I noticed that the higher the income and education attainment of the household, the more likely they are to have internet access. This is understandable and it is an assumption I had already made. What really interested me is that the Native American population had the lowest percentage
of access and the second highest percentage of dial up access. If someone were to look at this chart and make assumptions I would hazard a guess that they would assume that Native American households have the lower income lower education families. I know that for a lot of First Nations people that I know, that is the stereotype they face, and I also know that people who take in foster children from homes that can’t afford to look after their children are a majority of first nations children.
                 
Also while I was looking at the connectivity map tonight I was reminded of the current commercial starring Gene Simmons (among others). The commercial (found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nIhqMpq34gc ) asks watchers to go to their website
(www.olpccanada.com)
and donate to their cause. According to their website, their goal is “to provide
learning centered technology to Aboriginal youth across Canada [as they are] the
fastest growing demographic in Canada.” To date they have already given 3,600
laptops to aboriginal children ages 6-12 across Canada who live in rural, remote
and urban communities. This makes me wonder about all the other children in need
as my first practicum was a very low income school but I guess they have to
start somewhere.

Privacy is one of my biggest concerns in terms of social media and if I am being completely honest, I do not know much about FIPPA although I am starting to know more through this program. I know that whenever facebook changes something the first thing I do is go check my privacy and account settings, I want my friends to see all my pictures but not necessarily the rest of the world. I have actually been thinking about privacy
and students on facebook a lot lately for two reasons. First because I have had a few former students try to add me and with this in mind I have decided to make a rule for myself that I will add them if they still want to be friends after they graduate (a friend of mine made that rule with her students and I thought it was pretty smart). Second, a friend of mine is teaching overseas – actually two friends have done this lately – and they have been posting pictures of their school, their classroom and more recently their students (faces are clear as day) and I have wondered on more than one occasion if they have received the parent’s permission to do so.
                 
There is no doubt in my mind that Julia is correct when she states: “Posting student content on the internet (whether in a ‘secure’ school district site or more open locations like Wordpress or Twitter) provides many learning opportunities for students” (A K-12 Primer for British Columbia Teachers on Posting Students’ Work Online) but I am still struggling with how to do so securely. I am having my students share their essays with each other for peer editing and this is done over the internet as they are all living in various places around the province but I assign the partners in our secure classroom and they have each other’s email to send their work securely. I am not sure if they would feel comfortable or if their parents would be okay with them sharing it
with the world via twitter (sometimes I was a little leery of sharing my work on twitter for courses in this program). 
                 
Going back to my friends who post pictures of their classrooms and student’s faces, Julia states: “In the case of data posted on the internet, a student’s first name, combined with class or teacher information can be sufficient to uniquely identify an individual. While all this data may not be on one page on a site or service, if it is distributed across a site or sites (service or services) that information can be easily brought together to identify the specific student.” Yes, information on a variety of sites can be brought together to figure it out but for the three teachers I know, all you have to do is look in one of their photo albums and everything someone would
need is in one place, this really scares me the more I think about it. (Side note, I just took a break from this reflection to facebook message my friends and ask if they have parental consent for the pictures).
                 
With everything that I have said, I would be very interested in trying to use social media with my students. I am starting to come around to the idea (as I learn more about the protocols) that it would not be a horrible idea. I am becoming more confident in my knowledge of my boundaries and what it would require from the parent’s end to get started with this. Since I have a closed, password protected classroom, sharing work is easy with my students to another one of my students but twitter would open up the possibility of connecting with classrooms overseas which I have always wanted to do.

 
References:


Hengstler, J. (2013). A K-12 primer for British
Columbia teachers posting students' work online.



https://www.dropbox.com/s/qq03qytnj9k0fbg/Primer%20on%20Posting%20Minor%20Students%20Final.pdf 


 

The first thing that really interested me when looking at the course material is that on the syllabus it is
stated that “70% of US schools ban social media (Lemke, C., Coughlin, E., Garcia, L., Reifsneider, D.,& Baas, J., 2009) but 37% of US schools have a social media site (Purcell, Buchanan, Friedrich, 2013)”. This really confused me, 70% ban it yet 37% have it? The numbers just really did not add up – that was until I looked at the dates. If I look at this as simply as possible it stands to reason that in the past 4 years, 7% of schools in the US have gone from banning social media to embracing it. Right now this is where I am – in a limbo, an (or as Julia states in “Managing our digital footprints: Ostriches vs. Eagles”: “[a social media in the classroom Ostrich],
ignoring any educational applications of these technologies due to fear. I have social media profiles and use  them regularly, but am I ready to use them in a professional manner?
 
I am aware that there are many professional constraints with social media and I think this might be one of the main reasons that I am hesitant to use them with my students. In the past the way I saw it was – if I don’t use it with my students then I don’t have to know what my professional expectations would be. Now that I am being pushed to learn what my profession expects of me through use of these technologies, I am still left wondering if it will be worth it for my students and if I would get any push back from my administration or parents (as I teach in an independent Christian school); this may help or hinder because I might be super cautious if I decide to move forward with using it with my students or I may become more worried.

 As it stands right now, my students are enrolled in my online classroom through Canvas by Instructure. This platform allows me to have everything that Moodle offers plus a little bit more in a password protected area. At the same time it allows my students to have blogging/wiki capabilities to connect with one another but at the same time doing so privately. 
 
I am also worried about the problem of “no take-backs” I have attended a very in depth session about posting things and not being able to delete once they are there and it still amazes me how many people are still oblivious. This makes me worried about pictures my friends and family may take of me and post without my consent. Julia referenced to this in her “Ostriches vs. Eagles” paper when she says: The model of exponential publication and transmissions means that once tweeted—or otherwise published in a social network—there are no ‘take-backs”. I would want to make sure that my students were very clear on this before I introduced social
media to them – I think this is why I am starting them out in a closed environment. 

I have also had the issue of a past friend of mine wanting to take a picture of me so she could post it on Facebook but I declined and she couldn’t understand why, but I understood the “once it is there you can never remove it” and I really didn’t want a bunch of people seeing me in my swimsuit, much less my students being able to search it from her lack of privacy settings. I hope through this course I can learn more about this topic and at the same time inform others so that they are aware.
 
 
References:


Lemke, C., Coughlin, E., Garcia, L., Reifsneider, D., & Baas, J. (2009). Leadership for web 2.0 in education: Promise and reality. Culver City, CA: Metiri Group. Commissioned by CoSN through support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. http://cosn.enoah.com/Portals/7/docs/Web%202.0/CoSN%20Report%20042809Final%20w-cover.pdf 
 
Purcell, K., Buchanan, J., Friedrich, L. (2013). The impact of digital tools on student writing and how writing is taught in schools. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_NWP%20Writing%20and%20Tech.pdf

 Hengstler, J.  (2011). Managing digital footprints: Ostriches v. eagles".(2011). In S. Hirtz & K. Kelly (Eds.), Education
  for a Digital World 2.0 (2nd ed.) (Vol. 1, Part One: Emerging
  technologies and practices). Open
School/Crown Publications: Queen's
Printer for British Columbia, Canada.

For this image, I used mentionmapp. I can see my network being both organic and strategic. I have organic ties to my friends that I interact with on twitter such as @livethismoment and @stillsnapshot but at the same time my ties with @courosa is more strategic (although the pictures of his children and funny videos he posts aren’t too bad either) as he frequently posts educational resources and links that catch my interest and make me think. I also have colleagues from the OLTD program in my network which are for the most part strategic as I have a feed going on my hootsuite for #oltd and now #oltd506 which allows me to gain more professional ideas and resources from them.

 From my understanding of the Lankshear & Knobel (2011) reading, strong ties are with people that we consider friends and have face to face connections with and the weaker ties are our acquaintances. If this were the case then I could look at my map and say that my strong ties start on the left hand side of the map and move toward my weakest on the right. Still_snapshot and LisaJRempel are very good friends of mine and I talk to them quite regularly, they would also be the most “organic” part of my map. When looking at the map I have Jeankloppenburg and courosa in the middle which I would say is a great representation as I sometimes talk to Jean outside of class and the same goes for coursa. Finally JEJacek and Laura3Mann are colleagues from this program that
I interact with mostly on a strategic level though twitter but at the same time
although the last four are weaker than the first two, I connect on an
educational level. If you were to look at the map as an educational tool rather
than a purely personal one, the “strong ties” would become weak and at the same
time the “weak ties” would become strong. If that makes sense?

My initial thoughts and pre-reading ideas:


When I first completed the prior learning survey, the definition I gave for social media was: “apps, websites, technologies that allow you to connect with friends and the world about a variety of topics from personal to
professional and even world related.” My understanding of social media does not really extend past the twitter
and facebook (and a tiny bit of LinkedIn) worlds and these worlds are mostly personal, with very little professional connections (well for Facebook at least). With Twitter it is about a 50-50 personal and professional use ratio. I have always been interested in the possibility of using social media with my students but I am always so afraid of the privacy issues. Right now I use an online, password protected classroom via Canvas by
Instructure with my students and I actually just released a consent form to be agreed to by my students in relation to keeping the feelings of others in mind and not bullying as well as not posting anything that their parents would not let them (even though it is password protected). With that being said, Facebook or Twitter with my students seems still very farfetched for me. 

After reading the resources provided:

 In “Welcome to the Social Web” by Julia Hengstler, I found it interesting that Pinterest was listed as a social media site. I use Pinterest all the time (mostly for card making ideas and food / dessert ideas) but I never
thought of it as a social media tool and I really never thought that it would be a social media tool that can be used in the classroom! This is something that intrigues me a little but at the same time makes me question how valuable it would actually be. This is how I still feel about a lot of social media in terms of using it with my students. I realise that we have just started to scratch the surface of social media but if I am being completely honest then I would have to say it is going to take a lot of convincing to have me use it with my students.

 Also noted in “Welcome to the Social Web” Julia quotes: “In order to protect staff, it is strongly recommended
that separate professional accounts, pages or profiles should be used when communicating with pupils or the wider school community” (Kent County Council, 2011, p. 8). Because of this recommendation, if I am to create a separate professional account, this would create twice the work (in a matter of speaking) and I would need to make sure that it is something that would in fact benefit my students before taking it on. As a mother of two young girls, a teacher of multiple grades and all subject areas in an online distance learning setting and completing this program, I have found that I have to really be subjective to what I decide to use and what I decide to hold off on until I have more time to pursue it. Using the Tool Selection and Risk Assessment Questions posed by Julia, I think that this will be a great way to access what I might have time for and what might have to wait for a later date.

 Another worry of mine after reading about the social media sites from Wikipedia is the fact that I was completely overlooking some of the negatives that I would also have to deal with when working with my students in this setting. Wikipedia states: “Due to the increase in social media websites, there seems to be a positive correlation between the usage of such media with cyber-bullying, online sexual predators, and the
decrease in face-to-face interactions. Social media may expose children to images of alcohol, tobacco, and
sexual behaviors.” This is also a reason why I have a lot of parents that would take some convincing to use social media sites in the classroom as many of my students have been bullied in some form in the brick and mortar schools which caused them to switch to distance learning as well as the fact that I teach at a Christian school and some values of the families may prevent them from allowing their children to use social media.

 References:

 Julia Hengstler. (2012). Welcome to the Social Web.
https://d2l.viu.ca/content/enforced/37848-OLTD_OLTD506_W70_F2013/foundations_boundaries/Social%20Media%20Overview%202013.pdf?_&d2lSessionVal=YaGkjZCxJwtjwBXASe4bsDQhs&ou=37848 
 
Kent County Council. (2011). Using Social Media and Technology in Educational Settings. http://microsites2.segfl.org.uk/library/1318938291/kia_resource.pdf

 Social Media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media