“Twitter lessons” are one thing, but UK education needs to shake off its fear of anything to do with social media first.

The announcement yesterday that the UK government was planning to introduce “Twitter lessons” into British schools caused a bit of a stir online. Looking closer the story isn’t quite true, after all by the time any new curriculum reaches the classroom Twitter may well be yesterday’s news.

I interpreted Wednesday’s news as meaning general Social Media skills are to be taught to primary school students in future. As internet-based communication becomes an increasingly central part of our lives it’s important for children to learn online social networking skills early.

The thing is, if we are going to teach Social Media skills in UK schools, education needs to shake off its fear of social media first. If you don’t have much connection with the education world you may not have encountered this fear. So many people in charge of what our children learn are terrified of unlocking the potential of the benefits Social Media could bring to our classrooms.

The problems is that Social Media, with its emphasis on openness and sharing, is at odds with traditional notions of privacy and child protection. Child protection is a big thing when it comes to any kind of media in schools. Before so much as a photograph can be taken of a child permission needs to be gained from his or her parents.

Child Protection rules are important of course (especially when dealing with children who may be at risk if their identity is disclosed online) but we’re now in the Naked 21st Century and everyone, children included, are going to have to get used to having increasingly less privacy. The argument for using Social Media in schools is so compelling that education policy makers are going to have to relax the rules sooner rather than later.

An example – BBC News School Report
Take for example a project I worked on today. BBC News School Report is a brilliant initiative that sees children creating news programmes to a tight deadline with the support of the BBC’s formidable news resources. It’s a great way for young people to learn about the media and the hundreds of children who take part every year get a lot out of it.

The problem is that the students who aren’t taking part can’t follow the day’s progress. To solve this problem we decided to set up a Flickr account and a Twitter account to easily and quickly pass on images and news of our School Reporters’ progress. Brilliant! An easy and quick solution thanks to modern technology.

Unfortunately, it would seem we’re slightly ‘ahead of the curve’ in using these services within education and we weren’t allowed to use them. They fall foul of BBC School Report rules that forbid use of social networks aimed at the over 13s. The idea of this rule is to protect children in areas of the internet where they might encounter unsavoury adults.

Our ‘get around’ was for me to send text messages of our progress and images as email attachments to our web developer back at school to manually add to our site. It worked fine for helping people in school keep up-to-date but what about sharing the news?

We wanted to shout about what we were doing online. We wanted to send public updates on a network that would allow the news to travel far and wide and really publicise what we were doing. It could take the students’ work to a much wider audience. The rules (admittedly put in pace with honourable intentions) stopped us doing that.

As safe as crossing the road

As long as we teach children to behave safety online, social media is no more dangerous than letting a child walk home from school alone having been taught road safety.

While policy slowly catches up with the potential, educators can still get value out Social Media in the meantime. ICT In My Classroom is a blog that documents the innovative use of new technologies in a Primary School classroom, for example. Meanwhile, I’m looking for a suitable opportunity to use live video streaming in the school I work at through a private Qik stream that won’t be publicly available and thus won’t cause any problems.

Social Media has so much to offer – let’s unlock its potential and let our educators run free!

[Image Credit: Inx on Flickr]