BETT 2013 Interviews: Simon Finch

E-safety guru Simon Finch talks about why pupils should be allowed to use social media, why teachers should use it, e-safety and identity management.

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An example of how technology changes things

I have found the Never Seconds debacle quite interesting. Story in a nutshell, in case you missed it: nine-year-old Martha Payne writes a daily blog in which she uploads a picture of her school lunch and reviews it. Argylle and Bute Council has some sort of nervous breakdown and issues an edict telling Martha that she isn’t allowed to take photos of her lunch, because catering staff are now in fear of their jobs. As a consequence, Martha’s blog gets over 5 million page views in just a few days, the number of comments on her posts soars from around 30 to over 2,300 in two days, and Argyll and Bute rescind the ban.

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A good use for YouTube

As well as clearing out a whole load of stuff, we have also acquired a couple of cats. They are currently breaking us in, and we are hoping that by tomorrow they will have trained us sufficiently to allow us all to watch the royal wedding together in the comfort of our lounge.

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50 Rules of Social Media Etiquette for Students

I've just been checking my Google Reader subscriptions., and came across this interesting post from Social Guy. It contains 50 'netiquette' rules for students, categorised into General, Twitter and Facebook. Helpfully, there are sections devoted to job-seeking and grammar as well.

Observe the rules of etiquetteI don't agree with all of these 'rules'. For instance:

Substituting “2″ for “to” looks like you’re in junior high.

Well, perhaps, but it also saves one character, which could be crucial!

Another one:

You might think it’s nice to send an automatic message every time someone follows you, but it actually makes you look lazy and unengaged. Social media is about the personal effort behind the connection.

I agree, but not responding at all for a while also makes you look unengaged.

I shouldn't use this set of rules completely out of the box, but as a very useful starting point for discussion with students.

Interesting embeddable widget I discovered on Wesley Fryer's blog. It shows how many blog posts etc there have been since you loaded the widget, in real time.

I'm not actually sure how valuable or even how valid such information is. There is no doubt, however, that using it in a presentation, as Fryer intended to do, would be a good way of grabbing people's attention right from the start.

Perhaps it would work well in a classroom setting too, as a starting point for a discussion about what such statistics mean, in a 'real' sense.

You can obtain the widget, and more information about it, from Gary Hayes' website.