5 Responses to "RE: Unplugging Edmodo"
February 6, 2011 at 3:22 am
Oh, and to clarify, when I say “I have” these students on Facebook, I do not mean that they do this in class with me, or that I had anything to do with their presence in that medium. What I am reporting is the fact that those students are in my class, and have already created those accounts at home. They do not access them at school. (Duh- can you say blocked?) Just sayin’… 🙂
February 6, 2011 at 4:16 am
That’s amazing about the number of elementary students on Facebook. Most of my high school students are, but I didn’t realize that it started that young now. I wonder how many of their parents know about these accounts?
February 6, 2011 at 5:57 am
Well, prior to our ‘incident’, I would have said most parents know. They tend to have parents and older siblings as friends. However, I’m not sure the parents know that the kids can put them in a ‘box’ on Facebook, so the parent doesn’t see everything. I had a student telling me on Friday that his favorite Chrome extension was “Panic Button”- basically a ‘boss button’ which closes all your open tabs, and replaces them with a preset one. Which means kid can do whatever, hit the button when mom/dad come around, effectively hiding their stuff. And if they’re deleting cookies/history… well, mom and dad may never know. Scary thought. (We have our router turned on to track history, so that they my kiddos, were they to misuse the tech, couldn’t delete their trail…. or at least, not as easily.)
[…] article also made me think about RE: Unplugging Edmodo: Andrea wrote, “We will need to constantly monitor students beyond the 50 minutes they are in […]
AndreaCTER 
February 6, 2011 at 3:20 am
Of course! Just as they do it daily in the classroom; yet we know how to deal with that. We immediately tell them it’s inappropriate – perhaps send them to the dean or call their parents.
I love this quote, Andrea, as it is the essence of how I believe we need to handle social media in the early years. Children will be children, they make foolish choices at times, and they will be much better prepared to handle to open gate of social media in later years if we help them with this early on in the process. If they curse on the playground, we write them up and they have a behavior report. Same thing online… except it follows with an additional discussion on how in our cut-paste-copy-email-forward world once you post you’ve lost control of your content.
In our rounds of 80-90 students, I have several 3rd grades on Facebook, over 20 4th graders, and between 50-80% of the 5th grade class. It’s startling to hear things said like “these are adult privileges, and not for children”, when the start reality is that they are ALREADY THERE. Rather like the “rock and roll” concept of the ’50’s, this too is widely accepted by much of the world, as your satiric statistics suggest. Will we meet them there, or leave them to figure it out on their own? I hope we do the latter, since it is their future and our digital world that is at stake.