For our EdTech Inquiry project, Kelly, Mark, and myself first decided that we wanted to work on something relating to social media and students and perhaps how we can help students navigate this fairly complicated world.
Some initial inquiry questions we had were:
-How can we help students disseminate information that is coming their way via social media (ie. Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat)?
-Do algorithms in social media affect the way students think?
-Can critical thinking skills help students “survive” social media?
-What role does social media play in the classroom?
-What role do teachers have in students’ social media lives?
We also decided after some initial questions, to watch a documentary that recently came out on Netflix called “The Great Hack”:
After watching this documentary we realized there were even more possibilities for inquiry questions, and we decided on our inquiry topic: Educating students on data privacy.
Some of the topics covered in this documentary are pretty alarming, and we found it particularly interesting that a lot of manipulation can occur to sway what they referred to as “persuadables” ie. folks who are perhaps on the fence about which political party to vote for. These people are just waiting for someone to come along and tell them who to vote for, and our group can see that the students we will be teaching in the future fit perfectly into this category; they are first-time voters, who maybe don’t know how the system works, and are ripe for the picking.
We do realize that through the course of our inquiry our question might change, but it is nice to have this starting point.
Check back for more!
-A
