Previous related posts:
Part I: http://bertilak.ca/blog/idea/the-role-of-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-in-education/
Part II:http://bertilak.ca/blog/idea/the-role-of-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-in-education-part-ii-proof-of-concept/
From the initial moment this idea of using Mastodon as an educational tool plopped into my head I've been concerned with the one weak point in my grand scheme, the buy -in of instructors and staff that would serve as the admin/moderation roles. This adds a potential extra burden to teachers and educators who already have to spend their own time and money to best perform their job.
Any successful project would have to engage this group with tools and support before they would be able to add things to their already busy classroom.
Lesson Planning
Materials would be provided and served by the appliance that would act as lesson plans for classrooms in the various aspects of the technology, ie creating account, understanding the privacy options and sensitivity warnings. Secondly the plans would provide real-world integration and learning options that teachers could use to explore the value of social media with students.
Lesson Plans for older students could include more adult topics like exploitation, legal risks of inappropriate content and how to use other peoples content with consent.
Other Lesson Resources
- Digital Citizens Code of Conduct
- ...
Administrative Support
Tools and training for teachers to allow them to maximize the classroom benefits.
While fine grained user access controls don't exist for Mastodon, there is plenty of solutions from an operating system level that can expose tools to system groups based on automated criteria or direct admin intervention (ie marking assignments). Using these systems to allow users to progress through tutorials to expose, and eventually allow access to later tutorials is an established method of software training as is demonstrated by it's use in video games as a early game tutorial for players. Students would likely recognize the similarities and engage with positive reward based progression.
Older students could start at a more advanced level with tools to allow them to access the system in a less constricted way, perhaps with apps on their own devices.
IT Support
The appliances will be designed to be VERY easy to set-up and have a functioning classroom example system in 15 minutes or less. But things will still happen, so a rapid response system would need to be built in to admin support to manage the support tickets effectively.
A procedure for swapping, cloning, and replacing full appliances should be clear and easily practised. As those assets would be encrypted, so care would be needed to keep data integrity. Encrypted cloud backups could store vital user date for recovery but is a late stage feature.
Conclusion
Classroom level staff endorsement would be essential for this project to succeed but adding work to already overloaded staff isn't a viable solution. Additional class planning resources gives educators tools to teach digital life skills, tools they don't have at the moment. Administrative tools and support allow them to integrate the appliance in the classroom and comprehensive IT support would keep the units operational and useful. Together they provide a complete front to convince educators that digital life skills are essential classroom learning, and that with proper tools and support it can easily be integrated into any classroom with a little connectivity.