Social Media and Your Digital Tattoo

Last week, I had the pleasure of partnering up with the counseling department in Bedford High School's first annual Social Media Awareness Day. I must say that not only was it fun to help organize the day, but is was also very rewarding.

Last year the counseling department came to me with an idea to work together to help remind students (and staff) about how to handle social media in showcasing the 'goods' and the 'bads'. Throughout the school year, we got together in meetings to brainstorm what we exactly wanted to accomplish. We knew that there was going to be a presentation but we wanted to make the day even more than just that.

When it came to the presentation, we knew that we did not want to just lecture about the negatives of social media. Instead, we wanted our message to come out that it is ok and encouraged for students and staff to use social media with keeping precautions in mind.

To open this Prezi presentation in a new window, CLICK HERE.

We also wanted to make it real and personal for the students. With that, we surveyed our staff at BHS as well as all of our freshmen and sophomore students. That is right, we surveyed almost 600 students and staff!

We asked similar questions to both staff and students so that we would be able to make comparisons amongst each group. The results were very informative and helpful. Not only did we share the results in the presentation, but the counseling department also created posters to showcase in the main hallway.

We also decided that since we wanted to highlight how social media can have a positive impact on others (and we did not want students to get 'bored' of listening to Mrs. Puffer and I) we interviewed some teachers in the building. We asked them how social media has had a positive impact on them. It was really interesting to hear what the teachers had to share - personal and professional examples are both given in this video. To view this video in a new window, CLICK HERE. 

At the end of the presentation, we highlighted the YouTube video, "Look Up" by Gary Turk. If you have not yet seen this video, then you must take a look at it. This video really makes you think about your 'screen time'. We decided to challenge the entire BHS community and 'Look Up' during the lunch block that day. If you would like to view this video in a different window, CLICK HERE.

As students walked into the commons, some of the National Honor Society members as well as the BHS counselors reminded students of the challenge to not look at a device for 25 minutes and to be present.

These students actually took it another step further and placed all of their phones in the middle of the table while they were hanging out socializing and eating during their lunch break.

All in all, it was a great day! It was very refreshing hearing from teachers talking about how it either impacted the students or themselves in some way. The day would not have been possible without the Counseling Department - all the way from concept to reality. And a big kuddos to Ms. Puffer for helping give a great presentation. I know that I am already looking forward to next year.

Another GREAT Day to be a BULLDOG!

Creating Your Own 'DropBox' with Google Forms

Ever feel like you are in this situation?

• Want to give students the ability to decide what web tool to use for a project but don't want to receive an email from all of your students with the link to the product?
• Want to ask students to share a Google Document, Spreadsheet, or Presentation to your 'schoogle account' and they don't name it the way you asked.  This then causes an issue as you have to spend time searching for the right document in your own Google Drive account?

Google Form: This is a GREAT solution to the two situations stated above.  Google Forms is one of the options included in your Google Drive account. Several teachers at Bedford High have created what we are calling an Assignment Submission Form (the original idea came from a presentation I sat in given by Allison Mollica.  Basically, teachers are using the form option as a means of a dropbox.  Oh and did I mention that they are doing this with very little work.

Advantages to using this type of system:

• No more emails are sent to your account
• You can grade all student work from one spreadsheet as long as you have internet access
• You never need to change the link to your assignment submission form on your teacher website (even if you add assignment names to question 4 of the Google form)

Here are the suggested written steps regarding creating your own Assignment Submission Form:

A.  Create a new Google Form

B.  Name the Form

C.  Fill in your questions.  Suggested questions to ask in the form:

     1.  Last Name

     2.  First Name

     3.  Block

     4.  Assignment Name

     5.  Link to Assignment

D.  Choose a location for your Responses. (I usually say create a new spreadsheet with the name)

E.  Click on the View Live Form. Copy the link to this form and provide the link on your teacher website.

For those of you who are visual learners, I have also created a short video tutorial:

Creating Your Own Assignment Submission Form

For those of you who have a large number of students or you want to have some sort of system, watch this short video explaining how you can organize all of the student work in different tabs inside of the same Google Form.

Organizing Responses from Assignment Submission Form

So the next time you assign a task for students to complete, and it is web based (either through Google Drive or another web 2.0 tool) ask yourself, should I have them submit it through a form?

As always, if you ever have any questions, stop by room 222 and I will help you troubleshoot how this tool can be used in your situation.

Schoogle Away...