Ways to Implement Safe Social Media for Schools

If you believe that social media is just another fad that will come and go, you should stop reading this post right now. I won’t be hurt. However, if you believe that networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have become an integral part of our lives, but you’re struggling to safely incorporate them into the classroom or your schools, this is for you.

We’ve all heard plenty of anecdotes about the number of people who use social sites like Facebook or Twitter, but some of the most fascinating data I’ve read exposes exactly how much time we Americans spend using social media. In their 2012 earnings report, Facebook revealed that 48 percent of 18-34-year-olds check their account immediately upon waking up.

Possibly even more surprising, Experian claims that 27 percent of total U.S. Internet time is spent on social networking sites.

To say the least, social media is occupying more and more of our online time and in many ways is becoming a preferred method of communication. This begs the question: how do we educate today’s students on the best practices of using social networks?

I’m not a teacher, so I won’t pretend to understand the challenges of day-to-day life in the classroom and hallways, but I do know a thing or two about how social media can help or hurt your life, depending on how you use it.

1. Teach Students Blogging

Before there was a Facebook or Twitter, many of us were honing our creative writing skills by jumping into the blogosphere. Especially when combined with photography, blogs way to share my experiences and emotions with family and friends.

And blogs have something special built into them: just like social networks, blogs give us instant feedback. I can tell by the number of comments I receive what types of stories my “audience” enjoys, and inversely, which stories don’t resonate so well.

I love writing blogs about travel, for example. My father-in-law once gave me feedback that he thought a story I had written had too much of a negative voice. At that moment, I didn’t really agree, but upon further reflection, his critique reinforced my goal of keeping the blog as a place of inspiration instead of complaints.

The point is, by blogging on a regular basis, I found a team (my audience) who would provide constructive criticism that not only helped improve my creative writing skills but also gave me the opportunity to practice self-critique and reflection.

Some schools are turning to sites like Kidblog to bring safe blogging into the classroom. Kidblog makes it easy to emulate an adult’s “real” world blogging experience in the safety of the school by allowing you to set up an account for your class in a matter of minutes.

Your classroom activity is not publicly viewable on the web and students don’t need email addresses to create accounts. The best part of bringing blogging into the classroom is that besides getting a team of classmates to provide feedback, they get you, their teacher, as a coach.

2. Create a Social Media Class

While it may be challenging to bring a social network like Twitter into your classroom or school (or flat out disallowed by your school district), another option is to create a social media class. With a structured environment that the teacher controls, there is a tremendous opportunity to teach students about using these platforms as creative writing and communication tools.

This is exactly what Clifford Elementary School in Redwood City, California did. Teacher Jessica Schifrin taught a full-time technology class at Clifford, covering topics like social networking and desktop publishing.

When I met Jessica this fall, she told me that she could measure the progress in her students over the course of the year, mentioning that things they found appropriate to post early in the school year were later viewed as questionable or unacceptable. Self-critique in action.

Why do I feel that it’s so important to educate students on the ramifications of their activities on social sites like Facebook? Take one major technology company for example (I won’t call out any names). In this company’s current interview process, they require candidates to provide Facebook login credentials to get a closer look at their personal lives.

If they don’t like what they see, they can choose to use it as criteria to dismiss the candidate from the interview process. Perhaps someday legislation will be passed to prohibit this policy, but even then, it’s clear that our actions on social sites like Facebook and Instagram have certain permanence.

I’ve heard many teachers say that it’s a parent’s responsibility to watch over their child’s behavior on social media, and that’s true. But many parents I know are not nearly as nimble as their children when it comes to navigating social sites or keeping up with the latest hot network.

I know parents that are supervising their kid’s behavior on Facebook. Meanwhile, their daughter is ten times as active on Twitter or Instagram. Supervising is only half the battle. Providing education and tools that go from one network to the next is the other.

3. Create a Virtual Hallway

One area of school life that has a built-in tradition of capturing photos, memories, and stories from the year (the original Facebook) is the school yearbook.

A few companies, like Treering, are focused on helping students capture their very best memories and experiences from each school year through the vehicle of the school yearbook. This is done through an online portal or mobile app that allows students to share photos and memories with the rest of their school. Students then get to have their photos physically printed in their personal copy of the yearbook at the end of the school year.

Tools like Treering are private only to the school, providing a safe environment for each community. Additionally, (and here’s where the virtual hallway comes into play) they are always supervised by a parent, teacher, or administrator who oversees the yearbook production and approval process at the school.

I think there is something sacred about the yearbook – where students recognize that it’s not the place for inappropriate comments, photos, or remarks – that goes beyond supervision.

It moves closer to respect and the comprehension of what it means to take pride in something. Perhaps it has something to do with the vivid understanding that a printed book is here to stay. That teachers, parents, and even grandparents will get to see its contents. This is a bridge between social media and a tried and true practice at your school.

While it’s difficult to comprehend the permanence of things we do on the web, it’s easy to pick up an analog object like a yearbook and see that it will be around for a while. Students can see that it’s something they engaged with and helped build.

By marrying social media experiences with vehicles like the yearbook that already exist in your school, there exists an opportunity to pass along best practices and common sense to students, helping them avoid some of the pitfalls and traps of today’s web-based world.

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Treering was awarded the 2013 Tech & Learning Award of Excellence.‍

Tech & Learning's Awards of Excellence program has been recognizing outstanding ed tech curriculum products for over 30 years. With a solid reputation in the industry as a long-standing, high-quality program, the AOE recognizes both the "best of the best" and creative new offerings that help educators in the business of teaching, training, and managing with technology. All entries are given a rigorous test-driving by qualified educators in several rounds of judging. Products are also carefully screened by the T&L editorial team. Evaluation criteria include the following: quality and effectiveness, ease of use, creative use of technology, and suitability for use in an educational environment.

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Yearbooks in the Age of Cloud Computing

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Now that they can use social media to instantly share pictures, achievements, and other important milestones, do kids even want paper yearbooks anymore? And, at a time when anything beyond instruction is an extravagance, what about the cost?

A company by the name of Treering is addressing those questions with a customizable and on-demand printing model made possible by cloud computing. The process is rather simple. A teacher or parent yearbook administrator builds the pages by choosing from electronic templates and then dropping pictures and text into each page. The books include two customizable pages per child, with two more available for an extra charge.

Parents can work with their children to select pictures and text to commemorate important events from the school year. The bulk of the pages in every book are the same, just as in a traditional yearbook, but the customized pages will only appear in the designated child’s book. If a parent doesn’t choose to create custom pages, then the book will be made up only of the pages created by the school.

Taking a Tradition to the Cloud

Chad Hudelson, principal of Jefferson Christian Academy in Birmingham, AL, believes the yearbook is an important school tradition. In recent years, though, escalating costs meant that the school was losing $4,000 a year—and many families didn’t have the budget for purchasing books.

Hudelson said that to keep the price at a decent level ($50 to $55) for students, the school was required to buy a certain number of yearbooks. “We have boxes of unsold yearbooks from previous years,” he said, adding that, ““Our traditional yearbook company offered no solutions. We had to do something, but we just didn’t want to do away with yearbooks.”

The school chose Treering, which does not require it to buy a certain number of books. According to Hudelson, “The students purchase their own yearbooks. The school has no financial obligation and does not deal with any money. The ordering and paying for yearbooks are all done online.”

Hudelson also likes that a cloud-based publishing resource gives parents the opportunity to submit photos and copy (such as poems or other material) for the yearbook staff to use. In addition to greatly expanding the content beyond photos taken by students, this approach involves the entire school community in compiling the annual book. Students can sign each other’s yearbooks online and add customized messages personalizing individual books in a new way.

“At a small school like ours, where we do one yearbook for pre-school through 12th grade, the yearbook tends to be dominated with high school pictures and events, since those are the kids doing the yearbook,” Hudelson said. “The two free custom pages allow every parent to choose pictures they want in their child’s yearbook.

“They also love the ability to share photos of their students that the yearbook staff can use in the yearbook. The ability to interface easily with social networking sites such as Facebook makes the custom pages easy to do.”

Since making the switch, Hudelson said, “We have increased our yearbook sales in the last couple of years. With the traditional yearbooks, we were selling 50 to 75 a year. This year we sold 136 yearbooks at a cost of $22 to $29 a book.”

Mom in Charge

Melissa Mihok is a member of the PTA at Apollo Beach Elementary School (FL), and serves as the historian/yearbook liaison. She doesn’t have an IT department to back her up but said that Treering makes it easy to work on pages from any computer. After downloading custom software free of charge to one computer, she can access templates and other resources via a user login. Mihok said the students don’t work on the yearbook, so ease of use was crucial.

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