As someone who traces his social media roots to Myspace, today gave me a very different perspective on social media and what it means in today's society.
As many of you who are Facebook friends with me know, I purposely kind of changed my first name on my Facebook profile so it's harder for people to find me. But I thought it was interesting what was said about making sure you have a presence so the kids don't make one for you. It's just something I never thought of before. However, I loved the idea of the making an Instagram page for your students. I could definitely see using that for creative writing prompts. With the kids constantly on Instagram, I feel like this would be a great way to meet them where they are at.
I like the idea behind the #comment4kids thing, but I have to wonder how effective that is? The beauty and the curse of the internet is that anyone, and I mean anyone, can comment. The comment for kids hashtag can leave a lot of room for cyberbullying. Just a thought...
However, I do like the hashtags to find lesson plans and classroom ideas. I think that could be very effective and a great way to share information!
I love the use of multiple medias! Really good point with the potential for cyber bullying when sharing student work, especially on a broader scale. A lot of the blogs I interacted with when exploring the hashtag today had teacher moderation in them, where teacher approval is needed before comments appear. While this takes care of some of the random bullying, the potential for peer-to-peer cyber bullying still exists. Interesting stuff to grapple with!
ReplyDeleteMike, I love your idea of using Instagram for creative writing prompts - Instagram is such a popular platform for posting creative, inspiring, emotional, deep, poetic thoughts with dramatic pictures attached, it would be the perfect medium for stimulating creative writing ideas. I would love to see a concept where you gave them a prompt and then they had to post on the designated Instagram page with a 3-5 sentence (or whatever number you wanted) summary/glimpse/intro to how they would respond to that prompt. It could be an entire story, an excerpt, a free write, etc. but it would be an awesome way for them to brainstorm and get the writing process started, and then maybe they could come to class the next day to actually write the paper. Plus they would love finding that perfect picture to attach to it. As a fellow ELA teacher, I may have to steal that idea :) Lots of awesome stuff to think about!
ReplyDeleteI think that's an excellent point about cyberbullying. However, something that I noticed as I was going through everything was that many of the sites that were linked for comments required a moderator to approve comments. I assumed that would be the teacher, and it seemed like a pretty good line of defense to keep kids away from the worst of the joy that we know as comment sections.
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