10 Reasons School Leaders Should Pay Attention To Social Media

by By Kitty Porterfield and Meg Carnes
from the AASA website

At first glance, building a social network — with tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — may not seem like a wise investment for your district. But look again. social media can be far more useful to schools than it might appear.

1. It’s a new way to build relationships. By now, it should no longer be a surprise that the key to good leadership is strong relationships. (See Fullan, Kotter, Sparks, et al.) Creating relationships is an on-going job. Social media is a new—and very efficient—tool to help build stakeholder ties. It should be in your tool box.
2. It’s no longer about you anyway. It’s about your customers. Your parents and employees are growing younger by the day. They live their lives by a different set of rules than their parents did. (See Harnessing the Power of the Millennial Generation for details.) They want to work in teams, be part of the solution, and hear you tell them they’ve done a good job with their kids. They will not be shut out of the education process.
3. People are already talking about you. Join the community bulletin board. Google yourself. Create a weekly Google-Alert search for your school system. Read the newspaper comment boards. You will quickly find out what the neighbors are saying. Social media is our present-day equivalent of the front-porch, back-yard fence, and playground bench conversation. Listen in.
4. Your reputation is at stake. In the end, you are the one charged with maintaining your school or school district’s good name. The buck stops on your desk. If you only listen to your department heads and your PTA leadership, you will never hear the real concerns of parents and tax-payers division-wide. Social media is like managing a dozen focus groups that you didn’t have to create.
5. The response most likely will be positive. School systems that have taken a proactive step to establish social connections like a blog, a Twitter feed, and YouTube postings get high marks from their communities. The districts that feel the brunt of viral venom are those that don’t have digital avenues of conversation already open when a news story goes bad. When there is a way to hold a conversation, it softens the blow. It’s considered transparency.
6. You don’t have to do it all at once. Maybe all you do is start a Twitter account (free), which just gives you the opportunity to flash (your) headlines in 140 characters or less to your stakeholders’ phones and PDAs real time. On most days, it will be postings like “Three More National Merit Scholars Named Today. www.ourschooldivision.edu/honors” But think of the possibilities for “11AM Severe storm expected. Trailers evacuated. Students secure. www.ourschooldivision.edu/emergencyplan.” Sure, there is some upfront investment of time and resources, but the ROI (return on investment) will be well worth the effort. (Forget the what-I-had-for-breakfast stuff. That’s an old joke.)
7. Social media gives you the chance to stay ahead of the curve. Like putting your ear to the train tracks, you can hear the rumble of the approaching train. Social media gives you the opportunity to respond quickly to rumors and dissention, without the filters of the media. It takes a lot less time than writing and publishing a press release. And it can be much more far-reaching.
8. It’s not going away. The forms of social media will keep changing as new technologies emerge. (That’s the hardest part for the over-50 crowd. “Just when I learned to text….”) But the pace will only quicken and the focus will only sharpen. Part of the job is staying in the race. People use social media partly because they can—it’s here, it’s new, it’s cool. But social media also helps to fill a deep need in our communities to feel connected, to be in touch. If it didn’t, it would have already gone the way of the 8-track tape and the LP.
9. Social media helps you build community and a sense of ownership among your stakeholders. People only invest in what they care about. In today’s world, you cannot assume that anyone cares about or respects public institutions. People care when they feel cared for. A social media presence speaks to inclusion. It is an invitation to be part of the action.
10. It takes the whole village. We know that kids learn best when parents and the community are invested in what goes on in our classrooms. Social media is part of what it takes today to win that investment. It’s a small price.

Your Doctoral Degree Sponsored by Facebook

Facebook is enhancing its relationship with the academic world. The company announced the creation of five fellowships to be awarded to doctoral students in the 2010-11 academic year. The research-focused awards also include tuition, fees, travel money, a $30,000 stipend and more!

If you or an innovative PhD student you know is enrolled in a full-time PhD program in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, System Architecture or related area in the 2010-11 academic year read the full Facebook Fellowship Program Overview for more info.

2010: The Year to Integrate Tech. In Schools For Real

Doug Johnson writes:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. - Arthur Schopenhauer

There are some educational "truths" that we can't change, even if we wanted to. These educational technology resources, annoyances, and condiions are here to stay despite some educators denial, resistance and fast grip on the status quo. The sooner educators, especially tech directors and administrators, accept that these things are a permanent part of the educational landscape, the sooner attention will be paid to using them positively and productively.

Here is my short list of things that just are not going to go away...

Read the rest here:

These horses are out of the barn - Home - Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog

Creating, Remixing, Streaming and Listening to Music Online

As technology advances and bandwith + wireless expand like so many galaxies, the possibilities for music creation and listening become nearly limitless. Free possibilities abound. Here are some of my recent favorites/recommendations. Have fun with these.

Music Creation: Notation-Based
Noteflight

Music Creation: Loop-Based
i-nudge
One Motion-drum machine which can be exported as an SWF file.

Music Creation: Web-Based Audio Editing/Hosting
Indaba Music-Make and manage music at this online community.
Myna by Aviary-Use Myna to remix music tracks and audio clips. Apply sound effects and record your own voice or instruments.

Music Streaming/Listening
Grooveshark-Listen to streaming music in a clean, i-tunes-like interface. Create playlists, see photos of artists.

Songza.com-Listen to streaming music at songza.

Last FM- Search for, Learn about and listen to music by all types of musicians/artists. Doubles as a social networking site.


Pitchfork.com-Music plus reviews, news and features.

Mp3.com- This is a great site for discovering music that is not restricted by copyright. It is also organized by musical style and genre in a clear manner.

How to Find The Real URL of a Shortened One

When I first saw, "tiny.url" cropping up all over the place I wondered thought, Wow, what a popular website. So many people are linking to it. That was several years ago and I had no idea that tinyurl (and snipurl and bit.ly, etc..) were "shortened" or "masked" urls. Shortened urls allow you to take create a new url from an unwieldy long "http:" address. This is particularly helpful for adding links to a TWITTER tweet which is limited to only 140 characters.

Like all good things, shortened urls began being used in not so good ways (to hide urls of questionable websites, for example). Because of this many school servers began blocking them. If you use Twitter as a form of professional development and shortened urls are blocked at your workplace, you will miss some potentially useful information.

HOW TO FIND THE REAL URL OF A SHORTENED ONE

The easiest way to get the real url of a shortened on is to go to this website:
http://www.unshorten.com/index.php

Here you can copy and paste the short url into the form after which the correct url address is displayed. You can click it and be redirected to the site in a matter of seconds without it being blocked.

Just one more away to keep good information free and unrestricted.

What's With All The Tweeting?

Those that tweet about all things 'Education 2.0' are on a mission (me, too). That mission is to change some minds; to elucidate that times are a changin' and Academia better get on board. This is an important quest. The field (and so many in it) are slow to change--too slow to see the proverbial writing on the wall. That writing tells us that kids are different. They are wired (actually wire(d)less) but nonetheless connected to multimedia, to information, to other teens. They are the so-called Digital Natives and we best make efforts to reach them. And we also best get Luddites on board with all this tech that drives teen's lives. We best find ways to leverage these modes of connecting and communicating in the classroom! We Best! We must!..............................But.

But....is it really a quantitative paradigm we want to exemplify with regard to our use of tech? Because that's what I'm seeing all around me now-especially on Twitter: '21st Century Teachers' on a mission--blinging out their 'PLN' by tweeting incessantly like a South Korean World of Warcraft addict. I follow many such Tweeting Educators who seem to tweet all day, all evening and on weekends, too. What is going on here? There isn't possibly enough time to actually digest the information that is being tweeted and retweeted. It's like watching Educator's Gone Wild With Tech! I'm grateful for all the links, articles and potential professional development resources but when is it time to power down? Or is never the new normal?

I asked this on Twitter:

One reply I have received says it all:

"Excellent Question, message is that they have time on their hands--and perhaps the beginnings of a problem."

Yes, that seems to be the problem. Do we really want our Supervisors, Principals, Superintendents and School Boards thinking we have that much time on our hands?

What it boils down to is this: We can do an amazing job batting for the adoption of '21st century tech' in our schools and classrooms. We may even convince people that matter (our Supervisors, Principals, Superintendents and School Boards) to take a look. What will they see when they do? In one case I know, they will see a teacher that 'tweeted' over 10, 000 tweets in a matter of months. The questions When? Why? and Where? are all valid questions for Supervisors, Principals, Superintendents and School Boards to ask. I hope the answers point to the improvement of student learning. I also hope face to face interaction with them hasn't been marginalized either. In the case of Prinicpal's as Twitterers, the same questions might be harder to answer.

I hope there's Quality in all that Quantity. My personal assessment? There is. Let's just be sure to keep it that way.

The Slow Nature of Change in Schools

On a recent field trip, neither my students nor I was at threat of being eaten alive by a t-rex.

Why, despite ruling Earth for nearly 80 million years (even longer than Wall Street barons), are Cretaceous period animals not regularly chowing on our gizzards? Things change.

Scientists have suspected this for some time. In fact, a growing body of geologic evidence seems to support the theory that things today are not the same as they were 200 million years ago. (Many even suspect tomorrow will be different than today.)

Surprisingly, this idea of “change as constant” is not yet an accepted norm. (Though it comes as no surprise to anyone whose visited any number of schools in recent years.)

by Jason Flom, read the rest at: Shift Happens. (Even in Schools?) | Ecology of Education