K12 Schools Must Fill Need For Digital Media Skills
There is a new urgency to teach digital media literacy as a study finds students are taking online information for granted
Houston Independent School District Superintendent Terry Grier recently pointed out a troubling fact: About 2,800 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders were two or more years older than their classmates. “BIG problem,” he posted via Twitter, a Web site that allows him to post text messages and share them with “followers”—other users of the service who are interested in receiving the messages.
Grier uses Twitter to give updates on his meetings with staff and media interviews, link to interesting education news, and share important issues and facts about the district. “It’s not only that I enjoy using it as a social networking piece,” Grier says. “I like to use this to help communicate what I’m about as an instructional leader or administrative leader.”
He’s not alone among district officials, and many business people, in embracing social networking Web sites like Twitter and Facebook to get their messages across to hundreds of others within seconds.
Although Facebook began primarily serving college students, the social media site has become increasingly popular with adults. Thirty-one percent of Facebook users are 35 to 55 years old, according to recent research by InsideFacebook.com. And adults are increasingly using Facebook to connect with friends and share information, says graphic design specialist Delaina Beirnstein. “Facebook is my personal newspaper,” she says.
Community Notifications
The Salt Lake City School District began using Twitter and Facebook last April in response to public interest. “Many organizations, businesses and everything else have been moving in that direction, so our parents were expecting the same sort of response, the same notification process that they get from other places,” says Jason Olsen, the district’s communications officer.
The Salt Lake district has posted on Twitter and Facebook the same information it has shared on its regular district Web site, such as announcements of school awards and events, says Olsen, adding that he believes the services will boost traffic to the district Web site.
The district also links to articles or television news stories concerning its schools and has recently started publicizing its Facebook and Twitter presence on its Web site as well as in school newsletters.
In addition to informing users of upcoming school events and showing pictures from school activities, the district’s Facebook site has links to local news stories about teachers, students and programs. It has provided links to the Utah Gov. Gary Herbert’s budget recommendations and editorials arguing against cuts to education.
The district recently saw the value of social media services to communicate with parents during an emergency. In November, Salt Lake district officials used Facebook to notify parents that an elementary school was in lockdown as police investigated reports of shots fired off campus, Olsen says. It turned out that the incident was not connected with the school and no one was hurt.
Last December, the district used the same site to alert parents of a bomb threat at a high school and to let them know that students had been safely evacuated, Olsen says. About 15 minutes later, another Facebook message went out explaining that no bomb had been found and that students were back in class. In another example in December, Facebook was used to notify parents of a minor bus accident that resulted in no injuries. “Please drive safely,” the district wrote in its posting.
Now that the Salt Lake district has successfully used Facebook as a parental notification tool, officials are hoping to repeat that success with Twitter. “We hope that as the number of people following us on Twitter [and Facebook] grows, this will become a more effective notification tool,” Olsen says.
The Bellevue (Wash.) School District, located near Seattle, last fall set up Twitter and Facebook pages to mainly share information about weather-related school closures, says Ann Oxrieder, the district’s director of communications. The district, which lost seven school days due to snow during the last academic year, offers multiple ways for parents to find out about school closures, such as a district hotline number, e-mail, or local news reports, says Oxrieder.
A high school student who was interning in the district office suggested that the district add Facebook and Twitter to its notification options, explaining that many students check their Facebook pages daily.
The Tempe (Ariz.) Elementary School District embraced Twitter and Facebook in 2008 “because this was really becoming a way that a lot of people in the world were communicating,” says Gary Aungst, the district’s director of community affairs and marketing.
After experimenting with the sites, the Tempe district found that Twitter and Facebook are not great venues for sharing in-depth information because of the short nature of the posts, says Beirnstein. The sites should be viewed as channels for “short bursts of information,” she says, with links to other Web sites where viewers can learn more.
