While local school boards grapple with creating social media policies, the Fair Political Practices Commission held hearings about what constitutes political communication and the need for regulation.

Schools and the Classroom

With web access vie cell phones becoming more prevalent, more school districts are examining the need to explicitly address issues of cyberbullying from personal devices.

Community Engagement

The need for community engagement is increasing as school boards make difficult decisions about employees, programs and schools. This social media flowchart conceptualizes the relationship between social media, parent and community member experience, and the decision to take action in support of an organization like a school district.

Social Media Stores for the Week of March 26 is a post from: Effective Governance Teams

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When a school board looks to refine policies regarding use of the social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, establishing a line between personal and professional lives is difficult. One school district is experiencing such difficultly while others schools districts are discouraged use altogether.

Community Engagement

School districts looking for additional methods to communicate with the community are using Facebook to start a conversation.

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LinkedIn is considered a social networking site for professionals and has over 50 million members. If you have not created a profile on LinkedIn, I would encourage to consider it. It is a good place to network with other professionals in your community. If you already have a profile on LinkedIn, you can join a LinkedIn groups School Board Trustees and network with other school board trustees.

Schools and the Classroom

Rather then wait for the adults to provide access to student information, a high school senior created an iPhone application that provides class schedule information, grades and more.

A college professor blogs about the pros and cons of a new trend where colleges are allowing seniors to provide a video as a part of the admissions process .

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If you are a GMail user you may have noticed a new feature in your email: Buzz. This maybe a game changer for social media as Google enters the fray.

Schools and the Classroom

Should a school district be allowed to activate the webcam when any of their student issued laptops are reported lost or stolen? A lawsuit in Philadelphia filed this week will begin to decide the matter.

A Wake County middle-school teacher may be fired after she and her friends made caustic remarks on a Facebook page about her students, the South and Christianity.

In the 1983 movie War Games, a young Matthew Boderick gained access to the nation’s defense systems. Did the same thing happen when bored Chinese students hacked into Google? Do you want to a play a game?

Community Engagement

The simple act of asking for others opinion via a survey is the first step in the engagement process. The next step is sharing the results so a conversation can begin around shared values. This process is happening in Sacramento.

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As you venture forth into social networking arena, I am sure you are concerned about your personal privacy and the implications on your school district. For one point of view, the European Union has issued Seventeen Golden Rules for Keeping Safe on Social Networks.

Schools and the Classroom

Audits of the U.S. educational system have revealed that the highest hurdle to adopting skills-based teaching practices is the lack of an easily implementable curriculum. Enter social video games as a solution — immersive environments that simulate real-world problems. Today, technologically eager schools are replacing textbook learning with social video games, and improving learning outcomes in the process.

Wesley Fryer’s article on User Friendly Media, helps teachers locate “copyright friendly media”.

Community Engagement

Online surveys sponsored by school districts to reach feedback about budget priorities is a useful tool. More than 11,000 people took a survey sponsored by the Sacramento City Unified School District, including 4,200 students.

Publishing a recap of school board meetings with links to documents is a way to improve engagement with the community as well as build credibility.

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Do not underestimate the power of email. Over the past seven years I created email lists of over 1,000 email addresses from Board member email correspondence. By creating lists like Parents, Employees and Community, you can send periodic updates to targeted groups. It also helps come election time.

Schools and the Classroom

When examining the employee implications of implementing social media, a review of policies and practices should be done. For examples you can review an online database of social media policies and guidelines developed for Intel employees.

For teachers who using blogs in their classrooms it is recommended to use comment moderation for ALL blog posts and other social media websites they setup for use with K-12 students.

Do schools have to archive student email? It depends .

Community Engagement

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project is a part of a series of reports undertaken that highlight the attitudes and behaviors of the Millennial generation, a cohort of adults ages 18 to 29. The latest report focuses teenagers usage compared to the Millennial generation. Here is a recap of the report showing usage patterns of social media among teens to adults.

An overnight success ten years in the making, social media is as transformative as it is evolutionary. At last, 2010 is expected to be the year that social media goes mainstream for business. Typically, public education will another ten years behind the adoption by business. Here are the ten stages of social media integration .

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Are you frustrated about visiting a website to check for updates and wasting time? Now Google has a way to receive automatic updates when content changes on a webpage.

If you are looking for some guidance on how to spend your time in the evolving social media area, Chris Brogan offers his take on how to slice up your time .

Schools and the Classroom

There certainly ARE and should continue to be limits on the punishments school officials mete out in response to students’ off campus behavior with social media technologies. This case involving Taylor Cummings, who reportedly had a public Facebook page and was threatening school employees with physical violence is the latest example.

The Chino Valley Unified School District decided to enter the second decade of the 21st century by opening its first “virtual” high school. The virtual school – the district’s eighth high school – will be dedicated to an online multimedia curriculum. Students will be able learn via the Internet from home and on a personalized schedule.

Community Engagement

As more journalists get laid off, expect to see more local blogs covering public education. Here is an example of local blogger covering impact of the state budget on class size reduction in Alameda.

If the priests in the Catholic Church are being encouraged to blog by the Pope, can school districts administrators be far behind?

Creating Fan Page on Facebook is a popular trend for businesses. Before school districts create a Fan Page, here are guidelines to consider.

Pass along to others using the SHARE button.

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Board Members

Where are you on the Social Technographic Ladder?

If you are a Facebook user, it will not hurt to review your Facebook settings to insure what you thought you were sharing with the world is actually happening.

Confused by the dialog box requesting an email address when you sign up for an application on Facebook? This article explains how it works.

Do you constantly have 99 new notifications, marked with the little red button at the bottom right in your Facebook account? Would you like to only receive important notifications, such as comments from friends, and skip the stuff various applications send you? Read on.

Schools and the Classroom

The Kaiser Family Foundation has the results in from its latest media usage study, and it was enough to shock the authors. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours. Students no longer use technology as an add-on they have no choice .

The recently released video, “RE: Cry of the Dolphins,” is a clever and thought-provoking anti-cyberbullying effort by Google/YouTube, the National Crime Prevention Council and Saatchi & Saatchi. Watch closely, you’ll probably be surprised what happens.

Community Engagement

Using online surveys is becoming a more popular among school distircts, especially for budget reductions input. Currently Sacramento City and Oakland are using surveys to solicit input.

As more of us use non school district resources to communicate with our constituents using iPhones, blogs and social networking apps like Facebook, beware of the implications on public records requests.

As more newspapers declare bankruptcy impacting coverage of schools, what is your school district doing to create its own distribution channels of information?

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1. Love your employees

If you build your school district focusing on the student/parents without making the same careful commitment to your teachers/staff, you won’t succeed for long. The opposite is also true. The key is in enabling employees to learn continuously and to find meaning in their work.

2. Connect peers with a purpose

To combat the too tight-too loose dilemma, leaders who embed strategies that continuous and purposeful peer interaction will succeed. The social glue of simultaneously tight-loose systems will stick, not because the employees love their bosses but rather because they fall in love with their peers.

3. Capacity build prevails

Capacity building entails leaders investing in the development of individual and collaborative practices of a whole group or system to accomplish significant improvements. Capacity consists of new competencies, new resources (time, ideas, expertise) and new motivation. The challenge arises when the evaluation of effectiveness is performed as it needs transparency and peer interaction.

4. Learning is the work

The ability to integrate the precision needed for consistent performance (using what we are already know) with the new learning required for continuous improvement is the key behind “learning is the work.”

5. Transparency rules

Transparency is defined as continuous display of results, and clear and continuous access to practice (what is being done to get the results). When transparency consistently evident, it creates an aura of “positive pressure” – pressure that is experienced as fair and reasonable, pressure that is actionable.

6. Systems learn

Systems can learn on a continuous basis. The synergistic results of the five previous secrets in action builds a system that learns from itself. Two dominant change forces are unleashed: knowledge and commitment. As people learn their sense of meaning and motivation deepens. Learning means being humble in the face of complexity.

As Fullan concludes his book he provides six guidelines for keeping the secrets.

1. Seize the synergy
2. Define your own traveling theory
3. Share a secret, keep a secret
4. The world is the only oyster you have
5. Stay on the far side of complexity
6. Happiness is not what some of us think

I will cover them in a future post.

Six Secrets of Change is a post from: Effective Governance Teams

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CSBA has compiled a number of “how-to” articles to establish boundaries you deem appropriate. Here are some of the points to consider:

1. How many friends lists do you need? Does it matter if your Work or School Board friends see Family related posts? If so, you need to set privacy settings to prevent sharing between lists.
2. Do you want people to find you in Facebook? If not, you can remove your name from the Facebook Search results.
3. Do you want everyone to view photos or videos where you are tagged? If not, customize your photos to the appropriate level. Do not forget to protect any albums you may create.
4. Beware that using applications in Facebook can post messages on your Wall. So don’t visit applications or scan your profile every time that you do to insure you are comfortable with the message posted or delete it.
5. While it’s fun to show off that you have hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook, some of your friends don’t want to live public lives. That’s why it’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others.

Depending on you use Facebook, it can expand your network of school board contacts to improve communications in your community. While it is up to you to decide what is appropriate for you, recognize that your students, teachers and staff are engaging in the use of social networking. At a minimum you need to familiarize yourself with the educational implications of social networking, so you can make good policy decisions.

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