African connected
Catlin Gabel hosts one exchange student from Maru-a-Pula School in Botswana each year. Yesterday, our new student arrived in the States for the first time, but he had been in touch with his host family...
View ArticleSocial Networks at Catlin Gabel
The following parent evening presentation includes statistics on social network use in our school and examples of social software in the classroom. I wanted to provide some basics to parents unfamiliar...
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Gaming, social networks, and compulsive behavior
We recently held a parent evening with Jerald Block, M.D., psychiatrist and expert on internet addiction. Dr. Block provided the group with a highly data-based analysis of the issues, focusing our...
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Facebook changes fan pages
We just learned about Facebook fan pages, and now they’ve changed them! As we are only just starting to set up our pages, the change probably works to our advantage. As Mashable explains, the new fan...
View ArticleSocial Media In Education
Thank you to Alex Ragone and Vinnie Vrotny for hosting me on EdTechTalk. Here is the audio recording. As a follow-up to the CASE webinar on social networks and school advancement, we talked Facebook,...
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Posting links to Facebook fan pages
I figured out how to reinstate the “post link” tool on our Facebook page. From what I can tell, this application is supposed to be active by default, but it was not on our two new fan pages. Facebook...
View ArticleSocial Media Tools and School Admissions
I attended the FinalSite social media webinar this morning. They now have a web site to help schools get started with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Here are a few notes of the most...
View ArticleGetting close
I have had my head down working on our new school web site for the past few weeks, hence I have not written much here. We presented new features to focus groups: three faculty, one parent-faculty...
View ArticleFacebook fan page launched
We launched the Catlin Gabel Facebook fan page today. We are launching the tool to provide a strong community discussion space, using a technology that is already common. If it also helps us get the...
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Amateur Video On Your School Website
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth a million. Motion picture and audio better simulate “being there” than a long article or photo gallery. Video may capture the subtle...
View ArticleFacebook privacy changes in schools
This week, I sent my first “Facebook warning” to employees, students, and parents. Here’s the teacher version. Dear Colleagues, Facebook has implemented new privacy settings that make it much easier to...
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Blog Use
Happy New Year! To commemorate the end of the year, I took a look at this blog’s web statistics. A comparison of the number of posts to the number of pageviews is very interesting. I wrote the most...
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Thinking Critically About Facebook Apps
What do middle school students need to know about Facebook? On January 13, middle school head Paul Andrichuk and Information Technology staff Daisy Steele and Richard Kassissieh led an afternoon...
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Teach Fifth Graders Facebook? Yes!
This week, fifth grade students have been working on a Facebook page for the One Ounce project, an effort to convince people to each reduce waste by one ounce per day. The objectives of this activity...
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Facebook Freak-Out!
I am surprised by the level of hysteria over Facebook’s latest privacy changes and security breaches. Here’s why I’m neither upset nor leaving. Facebook has no social contract with its users. Facebook...
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How many fan pages do we have now?
As a result of Facebook’s new “Community Page” feature, our school now has two fan pages, one which we control, and one which we do not. Do you think this will confuse users? Why isn’t the community...
View ArticleIt’s all about social media, except when it isn’t.
I led a training session the other day to further integrate social media into our admission and development work. We considered a range of new uses: student bloggers, a dedicated Facebook page for...
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What Should You Post On Facebook?
A recent study “cracks” Facebook’s algorithms, with implications for school content managers. http://www.edsocialmedia.com/2010/10/what-should-you-post-on-facebook/
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Collectives, Not Communities
Viewing social networks as collectives rather than communities may help us make sense of their place in schools . How can a person have 1,000 friends? Why do students spend so much time on Facebook?...
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Underage Students on Google and Facebook
Google is cracking down on underage accounts. Young students who accurately reported their age when creating a GMail account are finding themselves shut out without warning. The account closure is...
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