Lou Barrios
Alliant Graduate Student
Social Media Accountability
For my project I will be examining the effects social media accountability can have on students and whether or not it can improve academic achievement within the general population.
I will incorporate Piaget's theories of cognitive development in design by focusing on my students formal operation. The students can get feedback from their peers via our Schoology social media platform and use the answer keys they have at home to check to make sure they understand the material. By also providing students the opportunity to team up and collaborate virtually they are able to get instantaneous feedback and improve without the teacher guiding them.
I will incorporate the Zone of Proximal Development theory by pushing students to teach each other through the creation of tutorial videos. I will send them a video showing them how to create a "Khan video," and I will create virtual study groups where they must teach each other using these tutorial videos that are made by their group mates.
In my project I would like to develop intuition and analytical thinking skills by using problems that have a real world connection. This problem based learning can be created by students as they follow my example and we can use our school's social media program (Schoology) to get students to create a thread that will continue to build as more ideas get posted. An example of this was my recent trip to Disneyland assignment. Students needed to analyze different modes of getting from their home to Disneyland using Public transportation, private bus companies, driving and/or combinations of multiple. In this process students must look through train schedules, figure out mpg for their vehicle and calculate the total cost for the different options. We then use spiraling strategies to bring back these different calculations throughout the course of our Do Now's for the week, so that students can see them in different scenarios.
In order to incorporate the learning theories into my social media project I'm going to need to get a little creative. My idea is to blend progressive learning theory with psychology-based learning theory. I would like to create a digital medium for students to reflect on their assessment experiences and have the ability to go back and discover the mistakes that they made. While also having the ability to get feedback from classmates and group partners. This would provide a space for reflecting on past experiences, so that those mistakes would not be repeated in the future. I also want to use a forum to allow for continued discourse and collaborative learning from outside the classroom. I believe that the learning environment makes a big differences in student learning and it is important to extend that learning outside the classroom, so that students aren't reliant on teachers to be sages on stages. Because if we can changed the mindset of our students to rely on teachers to be guides on the side, then they would naturally be more open to the idea of another student potentially being their guide when the teacher is not available and we can open them up to receiving peer feedback.
Psychological mechanisms in self-motivation is something that I think could make a substantial impact in schools district wide. Summits schools is proving that this level of motivation can be used to keep students motivated in the short term and the long term. The key to building motivation is having clear goals and giving specific timely feedback so that students can focus and fix mistakes. In my class I plan to have students implement SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound), this will allow students to have a bar that they have self created. I will also have students share their SMART goals with their Social media groups to help them support them in meeting their goals. We will incorporate the psychological mechanisms in self-motivation during our review for our assessments, so students can use our practice test to get feedback and support from their group, which will allow them to focus their studies.
