T&L Advisor Guest post — Carl Hooker, Director of Instructional Technology, Eanes Independent School District: Lately, my head’s been buried in this social media craze that I’ll call “Digital Broadcasting.” This is not a new concept, but with the proliferation of mobile devices, anyone can quickly live broadcast an event or person in real-time to the rest of the world. The rise of apps like Meerkat and Periscope have caused me to be both excited and skeptical of their use in education. If you are a skeptic, you will immediately think about all the violations, privacy issues, and copyright infringements that could potentially come from this. I went there with this blog post from earlier this week after one of my keynotes was “Periscoped” at a recent event. In this post, I said that with any new tool, sometimes there comes a need for some rules of etiquette. However, if you are someone who promotes sharing, these tools have a LOT of potential, if used correctly. From grabbing a quick video of a student performance or sharing out a message to the community, an app like Periscope can leverage existing social media (it links with Twitter) to make a 140-character tweet seem more life-like. Still not sure where you land on this? Check out Eric Sheninger’s blog post on “Leading with Video” or Tony Vincent’s post on “Live Periscope Broadcasts from ISTE 2015.” Despite my initial hesitations and concerns, I’m going to try this tool out and see where it leads and how it can help with education. I encourage you to follow along with me on this journey @mrhooker on Periscope and see where this could lead.
