Microsoft and Social Media

Following some recent successful trials using SkyDrive to promote collaborative learning I thought I’d look further into the social media activities of Microsoft. Our school predominantly uses Microsoft Office and rather than confusing matters by encouraging the use of much-lauded Google products, I’d rather keep things as simple as possible for ease of access for staff, teachers and parents.

Microsoft is not a name that I would instantly link to social media having largely remained on the sidelines while Facebook, Twitter and Google tested the water. Some have seen this as Microsoft missing the opportunity, but sometimes arriving late the party can be hugely beneficial. Windows 8 and Windows 365 already look like they are going to be very successful, along with very positive reviews of the Surface tablet. SkyDrive is very user-friendly and I have started to see some excellent collaborative work by my students and if Microsoft products can match the diversity and use of Google apps and other popular social media sites then I believe there’s a better chance of it being used rather than having multiple log-ins and social media experiences that aren’t connected in any way.

Socl (pronounced ‘social’) allows users to share ideas through rich collages of images, links, captions and videos. It is similar to Pinterest and uses the Bing search engine. Microsoft have said that they do not want to compete with Facebook and in-fact you can log on to Socl using your Facebook account, so the two are clearly complementary. Socl started as a project with Microsoft’s Fuselabs research team aimed at helping students learn. This has now been expanded to general use but the possibilities of collaborative learning are clear. Socl can also link easily to pictures files in stored in SkyDrive.

Microsoft Docs is another tool which links directly with Facebook and allows users to share Microsoft documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint as well as pdfs. This has always been one of the drawbacks of using Facebook for educational purposes and could be an interesting development.

Kodu Game Lab encourages kids to create games on the PC or Xbox via a simple visual programming language.

Montage is a flexible web-based service to create and share visual albums from the web.

Microsoft are also linked to Skype and Wordpress for those other functions that are so appealing on Google (Hangouts and Blogger).

I intend to explore these over the next few weeks with my classes to see which have stickability and generate opportunities for worthwhile interaction and collaboration.

Embracing Social Media - Handout

Here is the text from the handout that I used for my LearnLive session at BETT 2013 on 'Embracing Social Media in the 21st Century School'

Broadcast

Communicate interesting and relevant information to parents, students and the wider community. Promote the school’s ethos and celebrate the amazing things that happen on a daily basis.

Use Facebook and Twitter pages to reach your target audience – “fish where the fish are”.

Interact with your audience – respond to comments – see all forms of communication as an opportunity to promote the school. www.twitter.com, www.facebook.com/pages

Teach

Use social media to engage students in their learning. This is familiar territory for them which should be exploited.

Find out about the Flipped Classroom and Front-loading teaching concepts which lend themselves to social media.

Use teacher-generated videos to expose students to content outside of the classroom. www.khanacademy.org, www.ted.com, www.thevirtualschool.com.

Use Twitter (e.g. @DHSBusiness) or other blogging sites to keep students and parents informed of what is happening in lessons. www.blogger.com, http://wordpress.com.

Learn

Exploit social media to develop independent and collaborative learning.

Use social networks like Facebook and Google+ to create online communities for classes.

Encourage students to blog about their learning experiences (e.g. http://durringtonlearningblog.wordpress.com, @stjohnsclass8, @Hotspur3Y)

Use tools such as SkyDrive or Google Docs to encourage students to collaborate on learning.

Encourage students to make their own videos.

Protect

Teach students about digital literacy and online safety as part of your curriculum. Advise parents about the risks and opportunities of social media.

Ride the crest of the wave rather than bury your head in the sand.

Beware of The Creepy Treehouse

I had a very interesting conversation with a member of the audience after my Learn Live session at BETT yesterday who brought my attention to the concept of The Creepy Treehouse. This is a term that has been around, it would seem, for a few years and it refers to attempts by institutions and figures of authority to either replicate online social communities for an educational audience (such as Edmodo) or where young people are required to use online spaces such as Facebook or Twitter for educational purposes.

The issue was discussed by Professor Jason B. Jones of Central Connecticut State University back in March 2010 and he and undergraduate Alex Jarvis came up with the following advice for avoiding the Creepy Treehouse.

“Be transparent.  Explain why it’s required, what students will be graded on, etc.  Explain the tool’s ownership and logistics.  If you’ve set up a class Twitter account, consider sharing it with at least some students.Encourage self-organization.  There’s no need for you to create that Facebook group!  Let them do it.  (In my experience, Facebook groups I’ve created haven’t gotten much participation, but ones students have created about my classes have often gone well.Deputize worthwhile ad-hoc groups.  This encourages the perception–which hopefully is accurate!–that the class’s social media usage is bottom-up, and not top-down. Be nimble.  Notice how students are interacting with your course material, and put resources where they feel most comfortable.”

These all appear to be good pieces of advice for those engaging with students on social media but I challenge how much of a constraint this should be for schools.

First of all the concept itself has rather sinister connotations. It sounds like the name of one of those terrible American horror movies or the sequel to Hansel and Gretal. It suggests that students are suspicious in some ways of the intentions that teachers may have in interacting with them online. Social media already ignite some polarised opinions and this kind of sentiment would add great weight to the argument that schools shouldn’t go anywhere near this kind of thing. For those of us who already use social media in an educational setting it is also rather offensive.

Secondly the concept has now been around for about 5 years and I would argue that social media have moved on quite significantly in that time. 5 years ago I would probably have flinched at the idea of using Facebook for any kind of educational reason and would understand people’s reservations of encouraging adults and students connecting in this way. But social media are now quite a central part of many people’s lives and are used in a variety of ways.

Social media are no longer solely used by people to socialise. Many people use social media to connect to friends but increasing numbers also use social media to network, share ideas and collaborate in the workplace. As Ken Robinson says in Out of our Minds “new technologies are revolutionizing the nature of work everywhere”. If young people will be expected to engage with social media in the world of work when they leave school or university then surely schools need to be engaging with them at the point that they are learning how to use these tools, otherwise they will be unprepared, which could have some fairly disastrous consequences. Young people need to learn that they can interact with their friends on Facebook but one day they might also be expected to interact with their boss on Facebook or liaise with clients on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The social aspects of social media do not constrain themselves to socialising but should relate instead to the opportunites they create for interaction and collaboration which have more far-reaching potential in the fields of education and work than the rather insipid and shallow communications which dominate most Facebook walls of Twitter timelines. Social media sites are also not restricted to Facebook and Twitter. All video sharing sites (YouTube, TED, Khan Academy, The Virtual School), collaborative file creation software (Google Docs, SkyDrive) and blogging sites (Blogger, Wordpress) would also come under the social media umbrella and I’d like to meet the person that could convince me that these are not specifically aimed at education.

If we leave social media alone and concede that they are purely spaces for young people to socialise with one another then we also have to concede that we accept cyber bullying and that there is no educational benefit of allowing students to access information and share ideas anytime, anywhere. If educators have any intentions of using social media interactions with young people for anything other than school-related matters then they deserve to face the same disciplinary measures that I would hope any safeguarding concerns would raise, but let’s not demonise social media with these rather emotive tags.