Teacher Editorial | By Dawn Rothwell
Social Media Access in K-12 Schools
As a high school teacher and administrator, I have witnessed both the positive and negative effects of social media in the classroom for teenagers. It is easy to implicate social media as a distractor for students in the classroom, as well you would not have to wander very far to bump into a teacher who has some story about how social media has been used for cyberbullying. As a result of these concerns, educational policy makers have introduced a variety of Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) over the years to monitor and control students’ use and access to technology based on competing policy frames (Ahn, Bivona, & DiScala, 2011). Should school policies be framed in safety (to monitor and block student access to new technologies) or should policies be framed in media literacy (to integrate and teach students how to utilize new technologies within the classroom)? Our experiences as parents and educators during the rise of social media has fueled the debate regarding the merits of social networking in schools. What is the suitability of social media use in K-12 schools? To help address this question, I have turned to a recent review of research-based literature conducted by Greenhow and Askari (2017), to further help inform us on these current issues in education regarding the use of social network media (SNS).
The technological world is an ever-growing organism which is in a constant state of advancement. Sometimes, when I feel like I just learned how to do something, the new and improved version gets introduced. I remember (back in the day) creating any kind of document meant saving it multiple times (just so nothing got lost) onto a computer, floppy disc, or a compact disc. Then along came the USB and things were a little easier. All files could be stored on the USB (depending on amount of memory) and easily taken to another computer to open and work on. What a wonderful advancement in technology! Just when I thought nothing could beat a USB, along came “the cloud” more specifically, cloud computing. A more wonderful way to store and share virtually anything the user wants with anyone they want. Never heard of cloud computing? Keep on reading and I will explain a few things I have learned and how cloud computing has helped me as a teacher and a learner.