Social media also provides students with the public, have never been able to find within the four walls of the classroom. When you think about the assignment of writing the media, students can be re-read a piece of editing before it goes to the teacher, but most likely the only people who read a piece of the student and the teacher. When a grade is only given feedback that the student has received a rating the number and the comments left by the master. With the help of facebook app development student are bring able to write blogs which can be published to the world, can become true agents and the number of people who can read their work to grow with feedback they can get.

Chances are, frankly endless. I really hope that my survey of Twitter is not a character to use (or rather – the lack of) social media in an educational context. Can anyone prove that I was wrong? I’d love to hear stories about how the school is to integrate social media into the curriculum.

Hi Anwar,

Yes, an evaluation including the impact on learners and teachers was conducted and I would be happy to forward it to you. We are currently planning this years’ evaluation as well and we would be happy to discuss it as well!

Hi Eliane,

With regards to the I-DO project, was there an evaluation done of the impact the project has had on the students? (Especially if you have comparative “before and after” evaluation). I would be particularly interested in any evaluation you may have done on students’ attitude to learning, school, collaboration and teamwork.

What does it
take to transform teaching and learning? Great question!

While we are in
the process of measuring the greater impact of our work with UAE teachers,
anecdotally, the ones that report the greatest levels of positive
transformation in their classroom are those that:

<!–Are
given permission by their principals to experiment and try new teaching
methodologies in the classroom.Allow
students to “own” and take responsibility for their own learning.<!–Aren’t
afraid of making mistakes.<!Have
a voracious appetite for continuing their own learning – by taking courses,
reading, writing, visiting education settings abroad, using the Internet to
share their curricula ideas, etc.<Are
driven by a passion for helping others become learners for life.

One school that
embodies this approach is USA based High Tech
High. Teachers are empowered to create and collaborate on multidisciplinary
units and to share their lessons learned. Students at High Tech High engage in long-term
self-directed projects. They publish books highlighting their own learning and
continuously engage with experts and members of their community via digital
tools and in person. Passion is evident in all aspects of the school
community’s work.

Speaking of
community… Ministries of education and schools would benefit tremendously by
studying and incorporating methodologies from non-traditional community and
place-based education programs.

For example, in
the UAE, master diver Ernst van der Poll and Baraka Ventures have teamed up to
create Tawasul, an after school program
where children in the UAE study environmental science while learning to scuba
dive, engaging in beach cleanups and managing coral reef reconstruction
projects. Students document their learning by using a social network to blog,
share photos, publish videos and geotag their dives. Having volunteered with
Tawasul in the past – on a social media marketing project to save the sharks,
turtles and dolphins – rarely have I come across such an animated,
purpose-driven and passionate group of teenagers. To catch a glimpse of their
enthusiasm, watch Tawasul’s recent TEDxDubai
talk.

Every nation is
filled with exemplar and transformative education initiatives like the ones
above. Perhaps the greatest value of social media is that tools like Twitter,
Facebook and WordPress enable education decision makers, teachers and learners
around the world to unearth such gems, learn from them and be inspired by them.

Anna

P.S. One final
thought on transformational teaching and learning…

We often focus
finding the “right” solutions, curricula, staff and tools when it comes
to school reform initiatives. Perhaps we should take a step back and focus more
on asking the “right” questions. Questions like, “What is the
essence of education? How do we make the best schools FOR (not in) the world?
What’s possible?” welcome new ideas and transformative thinking. As
Einstein once wrote, “If I had an
hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the
first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the
proper question, I would solve the problem in less than five minutes.” 

Thanks Anna and Haif!

I love the question… Can you imagine the effect this would have on education if effectively streamlined and facilitated to students in a safe and culturally sensitive environment!

I would like to give you the example of iEARN, the International Education and Resource Network, (started in 1988) pioneering online collaborative learning and the Global Teenager Project (started in 1990) well before the availability of social media tools.

Research has proven that well structured collaborative project based learning and online learning circles enhance the learning outcomes and foster tolerance, understanding, respect, hence improving the quality of life on the planet!

“In addition to connecting students’ learning with local issues and meeting specific curriculum needs, every project proposed by teachers and students in iEARN has to answer the question, “How will this project improve the quality of life on the planet?”  This vision and purpose is the glue that holds iEARN together, enabling participants to become global citizens who make a difference by collaborating with their peers around the world.” (taken from the iEARN website)  

“People might be inherently social but biology doesn’t prepare people to work effectively in groups. Productive group work requires some form of structured interaction.  Learning circles is a structured form of collaboration that balances the value of individual ownership with collective responsibility for accomplishing shared learning goals. Learning circles have been used effectively in educational settings with students of all ages as well in professional development contexts with adults.” (taken from the Learning Circle Home website)

The online learning circle concept developed by Dr Margaret Riel and adopted by the Global Teenager Project is a solid and structured methodology bringing around 450 classes in over 60 thematic learning annually!

Projects such as iEARNand GTP and provide that safe and structured environment, and enable in-depth learning around questions and projects raised at the classroom level, helping students understand their own issues from the perspective of the “other”, taking ownership of their learning process, making sense of the world around them. Students learn with and from each other, they learn to be and to do!

On my end, I have used iEARN projects since 1999 and Learning Circles in various contexts since 2004!  Classes’ participation is often recurrent, if they benefit from the experience, they will participate in future projects.  A teacher taking part in the Circles of Understanding for example continues this year with the “Eco friendly school” learning circle!

Knowing that students are surrounded by social media.. they live it!  We go back to the question of “education school reform” as Sir Ken Robinson puts it so well. 

It is really beyond the availability of ICT, social media and networks! So what is the reason behind their use?

What does it take to transform the process of teaching and learning? What is the path of transformation of teachers?  What does it take to transform the learning system in a school; and if/how can social media support that transformation process?

Thank you Elaine and Anna for your posts and congratulations on the work that you do which undoubtedly has a great impact.

for a while now in every education forum or conference I have attended we constantly hear terms like student centered learning, personalized learning environment, project based learning, collaborative learning and several other educational concepts that revolve around exposing our students, providing them with multi faceted multi cultural learning experiences, and raising them as global citizens with an opinion, free to express their own views and opinions, and respecting of each other… My question is how can we do that without social media? Throughout the recent events as Anna mentioned we have seen how social media can organize people and gives them a podium to speak their minds freely, can you imagine the effect this would have on education if effectively streamlined and facilitated to students in a safe and culturally sensitive environment.

I have had the pleasure of visiting some schools in Jerusalem last week through Madrasati Palestine Initiative, and was blown away by how enlightened the students were, and how much passion they have for technology and access to the internet, in spite of the limited resources they have access to, and how much readiness they had to have access to technology in their schools.

At the Jordan Education Initiative (JEI), we are working on a number of initiatives in support of social media integration in education, some of these are:

-       Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Network – on this network, teachers and schools enroll in Microsoft’s Innovative Teachers and Innovative Schools programme, where they work on school improvement plans, improvement projects, research ideas, and pedagogies. In Jordan three of our discovery schools where selected as innovative schools, and we working with two schools in Lebanon that were also selected as innovative schools. The feedback, enthusiasm and level of engagement of the schools and teachers are amazing, as they found it to be a great way of interacting and learning from each other.

-       JEI 21st century teaching and learning training programme – a digitally enabled professional development programme that focuses on equipping the teachers with the 21st century teaching and learning concepts. The programme runs in modules with specific modules focusing on Project Based Learning, Collaborative learning and Effective research methods. Our final module of the programme is called “Putting Concepts into Practice”, in this module we focus on social medial and teach teachers how to use it to run project based learning classes and to use social media to post findings, pictures, videos by the students enabling students to interact, comment and give their opinions. Teachers have started implementing this approach in 6 schools so far, and while we do not yet have impact assessment performed on this programme, we can already see the level of engagement and enthusiasm significantly raised in students.

-       One to One learning model – this is a research project we have started at the JEI in two schools providing them with one laptop for every student, and a key component of this project is to use social media, and the ministry of education platform (Eduwave) to enhance project based learning in the schools, and to increase collaboration between the faculty members, the students and the parents.

In my humble opinion social media is the way forward for our students to learn in the future. What remains to be seen is how to align it with the learning outcomes and to make sure we do it in a safe environment that respects cultural sensitivities, yet allows effective intercultural diversity. Not an easy job, but a fun one and certainly well backed up by technology.

Thanks Elaine.

Having worked on a number of social media and education
projects throughout the Gulf for the past few years, I am continually energized
by the warm response, enthusiastic participation and powerful questions that
teachers begin to ask when given opportunities to learn about social media and
integrate it into their own teaching and learning.

Especially in rural areas, where schools have recently been
“wired” but still don’t have much in the way of libraries, gaining access to
the Internet and education social media websites such as Curriki (lesson sharing) and the Global
Education Collaborative (global teacher community for sharing best practices
and initiating collaborations) is a huge game changer. Teachers can now access
endless materials to spice up their lesson plans and engage in ongoing
professional development for free by participating in online education
communities of practice. I have also seen a number of teachers that are “burnt
out” by the “status quo” who become invigorated and inspired when they see how
excited students get to create blogs, make podcasts, develop online videos to
share with the world, etc.

As for integrating social media into the learning process
here are a few thoughts based on working with hundreds of public and private
school educators and schools throughout the UAE and Bahrain:

·     
Get
school administration onboard – Social media and collaboration tools can
profoundly increase teacher productivity, access to ongoing professional
development, student/parent engagement, etc. But, few schools are able to take
full advantage of these benefits without strong support and vision from the
principal, vice principal and faculty coordinators. Administration needs to
understand how to use the tools and provide time and space for teachers to
learn how to use them as well. Furthermore, they must communicate a strong
vision of how to use social media and collaboration tools to support the
school’s mission. Otherwise, school wide adoption and participation will be difficult.

·     
DDevelop
teacher leaders – When it comes to spreading the virtues of social media in
the classroom, teachers that have seen their classes transformed by blogs and wikis
are often the best candidates for helping all faculty in a school learn key
skills and understand the logistics required to make social media work in the
classroom context.

·     
Develop
student leaders – Students, for the most part, know more about social media
than adults. Schools should consider enrolling students’ participation in leading
digital literacy and digital safety workshops for teachers, their peers and
parents.

·     
Cross school pollination – In the emirate of Ras al Khaimah, for the last 1.5
years, the Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al Qasimi Foundation has been providing
semester long hybrid courses on weekends for free to teachers that express an
interest in learning how to integrate social media into the classroom. Every
two weeks, teachers attend 3 hours of face-to-face instruction and engage in
several online collaborations during the week using an online social media
platform. For homework, teachers must create classroom blogs and podcasts and
teach a variety of social media enhanced lessons to their students. The set-up
enables educators to build their ICT skills as well as experience first hand
the benefits of using social media “as a student” and “as a teacher”.
Furthermore, because participants must share and critique one another’s social
media enhanced lesson plans, teachers in RAK are increasingly sharing best
practices and learning from other schools.

·     
Use case studies – Since many educators are unfamiliar with the “logistics” of using
social media in the classroom or how to integrate social media into mandated
curricula, we often use video case studies and online discussion forums to
pinpoint effective versus ineffective uses of social media in teaching and
learning. Videos are powerful because they enable teachers to quickly envision
how social media might work in their classroom without having to “waste” too
much time figuring things out operationally.

As recent events in the Middle East have shown us, social
media can be a powerful agent for transformational change.  In schools, the road is certainly slower but
the impact is no less powerful.  In the
coming years satisfying the demand for quality education in the region is going
to be increasingly important.  Effective integration
of social media and collaborative technology can empower students and teachers
to take ownership of their own learning process. 

The topic for this discussion forum is the use, impact, and relevance of social media tools within an education context – how they are being used by students as part
of a collaborative learning mechanism; how teachers are trained to use
the tools themselves for peer collaboration and within a pedagogical
context.

Social media, if properly integrated within the education system, is set to have a major impact on
education and the way learners communicate, collaborate, construct their knowledge, and shape their understanding of the world around them.

In the past 10 years, I have worked online with educators and students from around the world
on “classroom-generated content” within projects that allowed classrooms to collaborate, research, and co-create different concrete outcomes: literary anthology, paintings, and murals, as well as meaningful discussions on diversity and the environment.

It was a great
experience for me to live the shift from working collaboratively within the confinement of predesigned online platforms (Moodle, forums, etc.) to the openness of social media. In both we generated outcomes, but the latter gave flexibility enabling both teachers and students to contribute to the content and structure of the platforms, sometimes creating their own. This ownership of their
learning proved to be of great importance in the engagement and development of users.

The latest project we worked on was the I-DO Project with 11 public schools (funded by Cisco with the support of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education in Lebanon, MEHE). It aimed to improve teaching and learning practices using social media in science research projects and culminated in the production of classroom videos. The videos will be published on the Cisco Show
and Share video portal to be accessed by schools that are part of the National Education Network. The aim is for students to create, share, and learn from each other, and so the learning outcomes
of a class actually become a source of knowledge for another. This ultimate goal gave a deep purpose to the video production which by itself was more challenging and exciting to produce than in any other way of presenting their work.

It simply has been fascinating to observe the development and collaboration of teachers, gradually
contributing to the wiki dedicated to the project, working in parallel with their students who were so motivated to create a collaborative classroom video. The project motivated teachers and students who produced quality outcome; the MEHE requested
to scale it up from 11 to 50 schools.

The I-DO professional development program was designed using collaborative project-based learning methodology, the scientific method, guidance, and tutorials to create short movies (subject, message, script, scenario, shooting, editing). Teachers interacted together and with the facilitators in a wiki for the duration of the project period. The professional development was delivered online and supported by face-to-face workshop.

A very important point I would like to highlight is web safety. In our online projects we operated in “secured environments” to ensure protection of our students (all below 18 and many below 13). Due to the hype surrounding Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube one has the tendency to assume that social media are limited to those provided by these famous and successful social networks; we operated in our own environment!

Social media has definitely impacted the way we communicate, know, learn, market, collaborate and create; so yes, it helps students’ engagement but using social media does not qutomatically imply engagement or investment of the learner in his/her learning process, neither does it imply quality of learning outcomes or valuable content created.

For social media to be relevant in education, it is essential for teachers to focus on the pedagogy behind their use and to create and design exciting and meaningful learning in a creative and nurturing context.

Taking in considering the success of grassroots project, the additional workload on teachers and students, and the rigidity of school systems, how can we integrate the use of social media in the learning process?