Social media isn’t just for students anymore. Some schools are utilizing Facebook, Twitter and blogs to keep in touch with parents, community members and alumni. Since it is easier to reach these constituents where they are instead of getting them to visit the school websites.
“It’s what the kids and parents are at home with, and it’s really important to be able to meet them where they are,” says Marlene Nesary, a spokeswoman International Society for Technology in Education, an Eugene, OR based nonprofit group that supports the use of information technology in learning.
Schools are realizing that the simplicity of social media status updates and opening up two-way communication are real and relationship-building benefits that social media platforms provide.
“If you can read a blog and can see pictures and watch video clips, all of a sudden you have some insight into what’s going on,” says Adrian Murphy the teacher at Green Acres in Rockville, MD that is responsible for the school’s new blog. “You’ve been invited to the conversation, and you can participate on your time.”
Reading a blog about interesting goings-on with the students and school can take as little as a minute or two, but getting parents to visit the school for a parent-teacher conference is very time-consuming. The instant and always-on nature of social media enables better, more consistent communication while preserving the precious commodity of time.
The headlines of the last six months reveal another ugly underbelly of the economic downtown: major school budget cuts in the hundreds of millions of dollars. To combat this, a growing number of schools are turning to money rich corporate sponsors, a practice typically reserved for events and sports team, but now a welcome outlet for increasingly essential school fundraising.School budgets are supplied by: local taxes (44%), state governments (47%) and the federal government (7%). Half of the states are facing budget shortfalls due to factors such as the housing downturn which diminishes sales tax revenue and property taxes and job losses which result in reduced income tax collections. Very heavily reliant on decent economic conditions, its easy to see why schools are taking a hit in this financial downturn.Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty views corporate sponsorship as an opportunity to procure much-needed funds: “I think it’s a good thing. I think there should be public-private partnerships in schools,” says Fenty. “I don’t think the government should just try and do everything themselves.”Schools sell naming rights to corporate sponsors. Texas and California have raised millions of dollars by selling naming rights to football games and allowing sponsors such as Pepsi and Nike brand high school sporting events.Even smaller cities are selling naming rights to gyms, locker rooms, cafeterias, school kitchens and even the principal’s office. For instance, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Acuity Insurance bought the naming rights to field houses for $650,000. Aurora Health Care sponsored the workout equipment for $400,000. And Associated Bank branded in-school stores for $60,000. Total naming rights have garnered over $1.5 million to schools in Sheboygan, a city of 51,000.Mayor Juan Perez says it’s a painless way to increase revenue, because the economic situation is “very bleak.” A city council Alderman, Mark Hanna from Sheboygan says, “Like so many cities, we’re struggling with an ever-shrinking budget and with the fact that our taxpayers are just tapped out.”But is allowing corporate sponsorship into schools widely attainable or appropriate? CEO Dean Bonham of the Bonham Group, a sports marketing company that negotiates naming indicates that the sponsor relationship works for schools and cities because “it costs them nothing to create this revenue.” For companies, he says sponsorship is “the best marketing platform available.”
In cities that have embraced sponsorships, little controversy from residents or school employees has been heard. The importance of maintaining school programs and staff trumps the curiosity of corporate branding.
From the playing field to the search field: sponsors go online
With this kind of out-of-the-box thinking, some schools are taking the tread even further. With the explosion in Internet and mobile usage and broadband penetration, educators have come to rely on the Internet as an essential tool for students to perform research and complete assignments. The next step is to transform portions of their websites into fundraising mechanisms.
Educated Search is a company whose mission is to create custom-designed, child-safe search engines for the benefit of schools, students, parents and the local community. The Educated Search engine creates a platform for more relevant, education-specific and local information. The search box is placed on the school’s home page and every page of the website, helping students and site visitors find what they need more quickly.
Businesses can gain focused brand exposure by sponsoring categories and subcategories in the education component of the ES search engine. Examples of categories include, “Solar Power” and “Shakespeare.” Local categories range the gamut, from travel to pet supplies to financial services and restaurants. As students and parents visit the school website, they will type in keywords specific to the categories and subcategories. The business will be recognized as the “Official Sponsor of the Category” when the search result is displayed. This will be an unobtrusive display, such as a small business logo next to the keyword category displayed on the search result page.
Companies already acquainted with youth charities easily transition to online sponsors
Speedy Cash, a Wichita-based financial services company, is in the oft-maligned but actually quite helpful industry of payday loans and cash advances. When used properly, people who find themselves in emergency financial situations can save money compared to late fees on bills. A single late payment fee per month could be the equivalent of a child’s education fund over the course of 20 years. A key to managing short-term expenses in tough times can include services such as payday loans. Speedy Cash regularly sponsors charities and youth organizations and schools in the communities it serves. Speedy Cash and corporations like them make excellent candidates for school sponsorships through the school’s search engine on its website.
With the inclusion of local and topic-specific sponsorships and advertising, the school search engine also becomes a revenue-generating resource for the school, allowing for investment in other beneficial student educational programs.
The social media hype continues and is enticing companies of every shape and size to dabble in creating new networks. To facilitate the craze, dozens of open source social networking platforms have launched. Jeremiah Owyyang’s blog lists over 60 brandable software platforms that can plug into your existing domain, allowing you to create your very own social network. But should any company build a social network?
In a Deloitte study of 100 businesses with online communities, Ed Moran found that 35% of these communities have less than 100 members and less than 25% have 1000 members. 6% of the businesses studied spent over $1 million on their social networks. Sadly, all too many fail at their attempts to connect customers to their brand because instead of focusing on the community itself, businesses are focusing on the value that social community could provide for their business.
Despite the failures, there are definitely industries that DO have ready-made communities with well-established brand alliance, and have a greater chance of building successful online communities. These verticals might include: local television networks (daily news watchers), radio (listening audiences), niche local communities (apartment renters, child-safe search) and education (school districts, private schools, universities).
Clark County School District, the 5th largest school district in the nation with nearly 300,000 students, was a few years back, reportedly the largest user of bandwidth in the Las Vegas valley. Schools are instant communities – not just in the “will you be my friend” sense of students, but in the student to teacher, student to parent and teacher to parent and relationships. Because they already have distinguishable groups in these necessary and long-standing relationships, Clark County can foster those relationships through a community network, which they’ve begun to explore with the CCSD website. Feedback mechanisms aren’t yet extant, but Homework Hotline, a public television program, gives students an outlet during the week to call in and ask teachers their tough homework assignment questions. Their content management system, my.CCSD.net reach the three main constituents in these ways: 1) teachers can create personalized websites to communicate with students and parents; 2) students can access to homework resources and assignments; 3) parents can locate their children’s classroom and assignment information online without involving the child or teachers. A cursory look at some teacher sites didn’t provide a lot in the way of content or personalization, but it is summer after all – the start of the school year should light this online community back up.
Morals of the story:
If you don’t have a pre-existing community, don’t assume that you can create one (and don’t spend a lot of money trying to create one).
If you do have a pre-existing community (and they already visit your website regularly), focus on the value that your social network will provide to your users.
Laptops and computers are used by students for video games, social media, email, and lecture notes…lecture notes?! New technology initiatives at college campuses are giving students the ability to download digital classroom images which are synced to audio files from their lectures. PowerPoint presentations and animations can be accessed from the school site and downloaded for future viewing. Students use the rich media to intensely study for tests and make sure they didn’t miss anything during the lecture.
According to the New York Times, Limor Raz, a Ph.D. candidate at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, reviews lectures in her neuroscience class by computer. “I can’t stress enough how much it helped me prepare for exams,” she said. “There’s a tremendous difference between viewing the lecture once and seeing it again. It’s not exactly easy, neuroscience. Trust me, it’s very tough.”
Students have been taking notes of lectures for quite a long time; this is just the next step in the evolution of education. It is combining education and technology in a new and innovative way to help not only the students, but the teachers as well, by having students that are better prepared for tests and exams.
Drexel University in Philadelphia is creating an online universe. They are utilizing a program created by Linden Labs called Second Life. This virtual world already has more than 8 million users worldwide with over 200 universities participating in the colonization of the Second Life alternate reality.
In 1983, Drexel was the first college to require students to have access to a computer. Now they have purchased an island in the Second Life world. The colleges of Medicine and Business are two of the eight colleges or departments that have decided to use the program, whether to provide students access to study guides or to teach classes.
As more schools move their presence online, they will have to add security measures to ensure the safety of their students and the records and accounts they maintain. Education isn’t just about teaching facts but about expanding the horizon of the students to help them understand concepts that were improbable to them before they went to college and to teach them to think on their own. Drexel University is offering a way to change their perspective of college while maintain a high-level, quality education.
In a recent study conducted by MTV, Microsoft and Nickelodeon, it was found that children use digital technology as a tool for communicating with their friends, expressing themselves and to be entertained, but technology in and of itself is not something that they particularly care to learn about. The technology itself isn’t the reason they own cell phones, computers and video games, but it is used as a way to enable them to communicate with their friends, whether online through IM programs, email, and social networking sites or text messaging them through their cell phones.
According to Colleen Fahey Rush, Executive Vice President of Research for MTV Networks, “Technology is adopted and adapted in different ways in different parts of the world — and that depends as much on local culture as on the technology itself.”
In Japan, children normally do not own a computer until they enter college, while in China fewer young people use mobile devices. Whereas globally, the average young person that utilizes digital technology has 94 phone numbers in their cell phone, 78 people on their messenger buddy list and about 86 people in their social networking community.
A frequent online activity for over half of the children studied was social networks. 35% of kids are claiming they use these sites because their friends are on them. While there have been amazing advances in communication technology, children use the technology not to the exclusion of spending time with their friends but to enhance the face-to-face interaction.
Students used to have to take classes to learn how to use computers, but that is no longer the case. A wide variety of classes are now using technology programs to help their children succeed in the classrooms. The programs are used for creating posters and instructional guides or used in art class to create self-portraits. There are also library programs and many music programs, to help stimulate the learning process for more than just computer classrooms.
Technology in schools is a way to engage the chidlren in more ways than just having them read information. It is stimulating an environment that will help them remember the information they are learning while providing remote access while students are at home. Schools are moving toward helping their studetns share information online with teachers and other students which will provide a more interactive environment for the students.
Teachers and parents are using collaborative technology to grant parents access to grades, homework assignments and absences. As technology advances, different and varied classes will find programs and opportunities to utilize the most cutting-edge program to benefit children’s education. Technology will continue to improve teacher productivity and student learning with the increase in new technology and software.
Rand McNally, in a bid to spark children’s imaginations, has created an online service to engage children in geography content and interactive games and activity. It will also provide teachers with skill-based lesson plans and assessments.
Joel Minister, chief cartographer of Rand McNally said, “With so much information on the Internet it is important that teachers know their material is coming from a reliable source. Rand McNally Classroom provides teachers with the comprehensive, interactive data they need from a name they know and trust.”
A benefit of the program is that because it is offered through a user name and password setup, the students can access the information at home to help them with their homework. The program also offers an interactive area where the students can be exposed to hands-on projects like place-the-states puzzle, continent quizzes and building their own map. There is also an area on the site that will help with the difficult to answer questions; this is “Ask the Experts”. It is an area where teachers, students and entire classes can receive answers to questions from the Rand McNally’s Geographic Information Services and editorial departments.
Geography is a core academic subject under the No Child Left Behind Act and this is a program that will help administrators, teachers, and students receive the information they need to succeed within a safe and entertaining environment.
In an article written by Julia Silverman, Oregon schools are looking at adopting a cyberbullying policy. Instead of children bullying other children at school, more are turning toward the Internet to bully their fellow classmates through social media websites. Cyberbullying is defined as the use of any electronic communication device to harass, intimidate or bully.
People are questioning whether schools have jurisdiction over what kids post while they are home. Currently the bill that is being proposed states that in order for the school to step in, the destructive posts would have to be conducted “on or immediately adjacent to school grounds, at any school-sponosored activity, on school-provided transportation or at any official school bus stop.”
The challenge school officials will have is verifying exactly who is behind the site, who posted the comments or pictures and where the person was at when the information was uploaded before any disciplinary action is proposed. Without proper evidence and legislation backing up the institutions, school boards could find themselves dealing with expensive legal disputes.
Teachers are using blogging as a way for children as young as kindergarteners to keep a daily journal. By providing a real audience to children, blogging is touted as inspiring children to quickly improve their writing skills and increase how often they write. In classrooms where the children are too young to write, students draw their entries instead, and then narrate their entries for teachers to transcribe or consolidate thoughts from the class into one entry.
But considering the transparency of blogs, it is paramount that the children’s safety be of utmost importance when children are allowed online in whatever capacity. The need for their safety outweighs the emergence of critical skills through blogging. Teachers should have the final say of what goes online so that they can edit out any identifying information before it is released to the public. Various types of software can ensure identity protection for the students, involving teachers in the final review process before publishing to the Web. Examples of this hierarchal control include Blogmeister, KidzLog and Think.com. Blogging can be a great resource for teachers to inspire their children to write and create stories and news articles, but it should always be tempered with safety in mind.
