Social Media At Work

Hall County board OKs social networking policy

Many businesses are challenged with employee recruitment, retention, training, and benefits, but now that technology is such a prevalent part of our everyday life, businesses are now facing the social networking explosion in the workplace.

The City of Grand Island was recently faced with something they hadn't prepared for, employees using social networking while on the city's clock. "With social networking technology such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn, virtually every employer is dealing with the same types of issues that Hall County is regarding using time and resources or disclosing inappropriate information about or from the workplace, he said. " (Grand Island Independent) The bottom line, is the board decided that employees shouldn't be accessing social networking sites during company time or on company equipment.

"Young said the technology does allow for better connectivity and communication and can even improved productivity. He cited multiple times when deputy county attorney's have used teh county's electronic infrastructure to research cases at home or prepare legal work for the county at home after hours." (Grand Island Independent) However, he continued to say that he feels that technology can drain productivity in the workplace.

It is clear that most of the time, digital citizenship is not being used when accessing the internet. It is important that we teach our students the where, when and how's of technology as we incorporate technology into our classrooms to teach content. I feel strongly that if students learn this now, they will be better workers in the future.

Jill Blaylock-Teaching the iGeneration

The article I read was titled Teaching the iGeneration from Educational Leadership February 2011. This article talked about how each of the different generations living today has specific characteristics that they are categorized by. The example in the article were the Traditional or Silent Generation which were people born from 1925-1946. This group believed in common goals and respected authority. The Baby Boomers are known to be optimistic, idealistic, and communicative and they value education and consumer goods. The next generation was generation X which was a generation that was hard to categorize. Then came Generation Y and the World Wide Web, which has influenced this generation since birth. These people have always known what the World Wide Web is. In this article, any person born after 1990 is known as the iGeneration. The “i” stands for the “i” in iPhone, iPod , Wii, and any other thing you can think of related to technology that has an “i” in it. The article states, “Children and youth in this new generation are defined by their technology, and media use, their love of electronic communication and their need to multitask.” Students of this generation believe there can be an app created to do anything, and if it is not created, it will be created soon. Students today are using technology and media any chance they can get. This generation uses Facebook, instant messenger, texting, and Skype to communicate, unlike the previous generation who communicated face to face, and used a telephone connected to a wall to communicate.

Students today are mulitaskers. They can text, surf the net, and watch television all while working on their homework. No wonder students are bored in school when they have to sit and listen to a teacher lecture or watch a PowerPoint presentation. How can we change this so that students are more interested in school? Technology needs to be incorporated into the class; however, technology does not teach the class. The technology can be used to make the learning more powerful and connect to the generation that is in the classroom.

Several websites were suggested to help enhance the learning that is taking place. These were Discovery Education’s Lesson Plan Library, Teachers Helping Teachers, TeachersFirst, and Thinkfinity. These sites can help enhance the technology in your classroom.

One of teachers complaints about technology is that they do not have enough time to research and put all the pieces together for a unit they may be teaching. A suggestion in this article was to have a high school student come to your class and tell them what you are looking for and more than likely, they will come back with more than plenty of information for you to share with your class about this topic using technology. The teacher then would have to only go through the information that was collected and narrow it down to what you can use in your classroom.

This article was very interesting to me. I would have never thought of the different generations and how technology has evolved since the 1900’s. The teachers that are teaching today need to make sure that they are connecting with their students by using technology. Yes, finding the correct technology that is available for you to use while teaching takes time, but the amount of time it takes to learn the technology and figure out the correct type of technology to use for your lesson will benefit the students more than you know.

http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com.proxyweb.doane.edu/hww/results/getResults.jhtml?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.35 I found this article on the online database from the Doane Library.