The InformED Report for January 24, 2017 set two views of social media side by side: a case for colleges using it to listen to students, and a British study linking social media use with lower life satisfaction among children. It then looked at what schools need in place before adopting wearable devices and virtual reality. The spotlight went to a Maryland mother who found that no one could say how much her county spent on early help for struggling students.
In this edition
- Eric Stoller argued in Inside Higher Ed that colleges can use social media to hear from students in real time, rather than waiting for year-end surveys.
- A study of British children aged 10 to 15 linked one hour a day of chatting on social networks with lower life satisfaction.
- EdTech Magazine set out three things schools need before adopting wearables: enough bandwidth, safe handling of student data and thorough planning and training.
- Katherine Spurlock found that Maryland districts kept no data on spending for early academic and behavioral interventions, and legislators moved to require it.
Social media as a way to listen to students
In his Inside Higher Ed blog, Eric Stoller took his cue from Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, who at the end of 2016 asked users on Twitter what they wanted the platform to improve. Stoller’s argument was that colleges could do the same. By asking students well-designed questions on social media, institutions gain real-time responses and ideas that may never surface in formal surveys. “Why wait until an end-of-year survey,” he asked, when students can be polled throughout the year?
He was candid about the drawbacks. Some responses will be exaggerated, and Twitter itself had serious problems with hate speech and trolling. But he argued that useful threads usually run through even the noisiest replies, and that the same channels can later support community building, student services and conversations with students about their digital identity.
One hour a day, and children’s wellbeing
The other side of the screen-time question came from NBC News, where Nicole Spector reported on “Social Media Use and Children’s Wellbeing,” a paper published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Drawing on surveys of British households from 2010 to 2014, the authors found that children aged 10 to 15 who spent one hour a day chatting on social networks were less content overall. In their words, that hour reduced the probability of being completely satisfied with life by approximately 14 percentage points.
The study is worth reading carefully. It describes British families, and it measures an association with reported life satisfaction rather than proving that social media causes unhappiness. The authors pointed to cyberbullying, more social comparison and less face-to-face time as possible explanations. For schools encouraging more screen-based learning, it was a reason to think about how and why students are online, and to teach the risks as well as the benefits, as a therapist quoted in Spector’s piece recommended.
Getting schools ready for connected devices
In EdTech Magazine, Erin Brereton noted that the New Media Consortium expected wearable technology to reach widespread use in K-12 within four to five years. Washington Leadership Academy, a technology-focused charter school in Washington, D.C., planned to use virtual reality headsets in chemistry class. Brereton set out three things schools should do first.
The first was bandwidth. A 2016 Funds for Learning report found that 44 percent of E-Rate applicants surveyed said their Wi-Fi network was more than three years old. The second was data. Wearables collect and share information about students, so schools need to know how it will be transmitted and stored. Westonka Public Schools in suburban Minneapolis, which gave students heart rate monitors for physical education, questioned vendors on data security and limited access to the app to Femrite and the district’s physical education teachers. The third was planning and training. Westonka piloted the program with 85 fourth graders and 90 seventh graders, and staff attended a daylong webinar run by the manufacturer before launch. “You cannot throw technology at people and expect it all to work perfectly,” said Mark Femrite, the district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.
InformED Report spotlight: a mother follows the money on early intervention
Katherine Spurlock, a former public school teacher, moved to Montgomery County, Maryland, and set out to make sure her daughter, who has dyslexia, received the right interventions in school, Valerie Strauss reported in The Washington Post. Along the way she discovered that the county had no data showing how much it spent on early academic or behavioral interventions for students who need them, and neither did any other county in Maryland.
That gap matters because research shows that intervention from kindergarten through third grade can ease learning disabilities and improve outcomes. Maryland’s own special education data showed many students referred only after those early grades, when achievement gaps had already opened. Spurlock worked with legislators, and state Sen. Joan Carter Conway and Del. Marc Korman introduced bills to require school boards to report data on specialized intervention services each year. For district leaders, the question her work raised was a simple one to ask of their own budgets: how much is spent on early intervention, at what ages, and is it helping?
Further reading from that week
- Education Dive: Department of Education offers schools new ed tech evaluation tool
- Education World: How Will a Trump Admin Impact Tech in Schools? Office of Ed Tech Defines Goals
- EdTech Magazine: K-12 Schools Embrace Anytime, Anywhere Learning
Sources
- Eric Stoller, “Using Social Media to Listen and Learn from Students,” Inside Higher Ed, January 5, 2017.
- Nicole Spector, “Just One Hour a Day on Social Media Makes Teens Miserable,” NBC News, December 29, 2016.
- Erin Brereton, “3 Tips to Prepare Schools for Connected Devices,” EdTech Magazine, January 4, 2017.
- Valerie Strauss, “How one mother discovered a problem with special education and got legislators to help try to fix it,” The Washington Post, January 8, 2017.
About the InformED Report
The InformED Report is edCircuit’s short news program on education. This edition first ran on January 24, 2017. In 2026, edCircuit re-presented it with a new anchor and this full written account. Both report the stories as they stood on that date and link the original reporting, so readers can see exactly where each claim came from.
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