The Science Classroom

Within this paper I have to tell the reason for conducting the research. I basically have to “sell” my reasoning for doing the research. It’s freaking social media! Enough said, right? Well, apparently not because that’s not the “way its done” in formal academic writing. Following is a very very very rough draft of my “significance of study” section. I’m interested to hear what you have to say about it, so here goes…btw, it’ll be the last post of the evening as tomorrow will be here soon and I’m ready to pull the pork out of the smoker and hit the sack! So here it is:

Significance of Study
Many schools of education rely heavily on the belief that education should be made relevant to students. Social media a one way to make be relevant in today’s culture. Society as a whole is moving, more and more, toward an electronic exchange of information. What possible motivation do students have to buy in to the need to get an education when it is using a system of information delivery, bound textbooks, that is based on technology dating back to the early Greeks? Education is being left behind by not adapting to current trends in culture and society. Social media is becoming more and more pervasive throughout society. Companies are implementing viral marketing campaigns through mediums such as Twitter and Facebook. New job descriptions are being written everyday, which involve marketing through social media. Information is exchanged freely without cost. Companies no longer rely on advertising firms to get their product in front of the consumer; they simply hire a social media consultant and take matters into their own hands. Why should education be any different? There is no reason to wait for the next textbook to come out when, through a collaboration of many classrooms, a current textbook could be written in wiki format. It could be changed to remain up to date. Why do teachers need to wait for the next how-to-teach book to come out when they can begin adding book writers to a network of social bookmarks and start synthesizing the exact same information the authors are reading?

The day of immediate access to information has arrived and it has come in the form of social media. Wikipedia is a great example of this. Celebrity pages on Wikipedia are updated before shows cataloging their ridiculous antics are even on commercial break. It seems there is a never-ending stream of editors willing to make this worldwide collaborative effort the be-all, end-all fountain of information. Social media tools like wikis are more accurate than print information because there is no waiting for a new edition to be printed.

Social Media is going to be revolution. Albert Einstein once said, “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting the results you’ve been getting.” This is the trap of education. Many teachers are unwilling to change their method simply because they have always done it that way. That is not a good reason to keep teaching students the same way. In many ways, its similar to a farmer who plants his seeds by hand and harvests his wheat using a hand-swung scythe. Meanwhile, his neighbor is using a state-of-the-art tractor planting machine and an air-conditioned, satellite navigation equipped combine to harvest. The old-fashioned farmer is constantly wondering, “Why am I not being more productive like my neighbor?” Hopefully the education system, with some help from the inside, will realize we have been planting all of our seeds by hand while there is a state-of-the-art electronic planter sitting in our classroom waiting to be used.

This week finds me thinking about a research project we started in the Educational Research module of the MACI program at SNU.  This module may prove to be the most challenging class of my academic career, but possibly the most rewarding. I am integrating the research project into a some sub-committee work I am doing with the Putnam City Technology Committee. We are tasked with integrating online resources into our curriculum and I think social media is a great extension of the classroom.

My research is qualitative in nature, probably due to the time constraints of a six week-long module, so I will not have any hard numbers to analyze. I have already begun to notify my peer learning network of this project and will be contacting many of them further, via social media, of course!

Since my research is about social media, I thought it might be appropriate to talk about the different types I use in my classroom.

• Facebook – I friend students (at their request, not mine) on facebook and use it as a way to build community beyond my classroom. Students communicate with me for homework help via the chat function. I get better insight into student’s home life through status updates. I am also able to show students that I am a real person as they read my status updates. They can get some insight into my home life, as well, and begin to understand that I do normal things; I am just a person with many of the same life struggles as they have.
• Twitter – I only have a few students who use twitter, but I still consider it social media in my classroom. Most of the students I am in contact with through twitter are in my advisory class (Pirate Time – kind of like a homeroom, which students attend once a week).  This enables me to know what is going on in their lives, since I only get to see them once a week.
• Wikis – I do a wiki project in my physics class, which has been mentioned several times on this blog. Its seems to be more “acceptable” to students, instead of a straight ahead research paper, even though that’s what they are doing. It is a “paperless” research paper. They even submit the entire project to turnitin.com at the conclusion of the project. Its much easier to grade, since I only need an internet capable computer, instead of carrying around a gigantic stack of papers. The point of the project, however, is not to make things easy on me. The point is to teach students they have the ability to contribute to the body of knowledge and their contributions can be seen/used by others. It extends the boundaries of our classroom beyond the walls of our school.  English teachers constantly talk to students about “writing to their audience”, but do they do anything to extend the audience beyond the teachers themselves? In most cases, probably not.  This project also teaches students not to be afraid of Wikipedia, but that’s an entirely different post.
• Skype – I am very new to skype. Skype is a free, voice over IP (VOIP), which allows free videoconferencing. I’ve been consulting with mishelleyb since last year about this, but am just now getting its use implemented. I have some ideas for this in the classroom and they include:

1. Guest scientists – Its much easier to have a researcher talk to a webcam for 15 minutes than it is to have them travel to Oklahoma City.
2. Collaboration with other classrooms – I just contacted another Earth Science teacher in Maine via email and we are hoping to talk to each others classrooms about the differences in climate, types of storms, etc. through skype.

• Social Bookmarking – I am vested in delicious.com, even though there are several platforms out there, which offer the same benefits. I require, at the beginning of the wiki project, each student to setup an account with Delicious. They save each bookmark on delicious as while they are working on the research project. I require them to tag each bookmark with “pcwiki”, so they are easily searchable. Anyone can go to the website and search for that tag and see the resources we are using for the project. It also allows me to easily share bookmarks with students as I find them by simply tagging them when I save the bookmark. It makes the transition from home computer to school computer much easier by eliminating the need for saving all bookmarks in a document on a flash drive. I have noticed my most successful students continue to use this tool even after they leave my classroom, especially as they begin to work on projects in college. This fact makes me very happy!

Have you noticed a recurring theme in my reasoning for the use of social media? If you guessed extending the boundaries of my classroom, you guessed correctly! Each different type of social media I use were chosen specifically for that reason.

The following are a list of questions I am going to begin using in my research project. I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas about them. If you are interested in being an interviewee, please contact me via email (jbowie at putnamcityschools dot org) or direct message me on twitter. Do you use social media in your classroom? Why do you use it? Why do you not use it? What experience have you had with social media in the past? Do you feel your students are prepared for the 21st century?  Why or why not? Do they have the ICT skills needed to be successful after leaving your classroom? Are you aligning your curriculum to include these technology standards? Why or why not? Would you please share a positive or negative experience you have had with the use of social media in an educational setting?

I am looking forward to your comments! As always, thanks for reading.