Should we teach social media in the classroom? Fall 2019
0 General Document comments
0 Sentence and Paragraph comments
0 Image and Video comments
Is Social Media Relevant? Take the Quiz
Before we talk social media, let's talk about the relevance of social media by taking a quiz. Which of the following is most likely to be true?
- ☐ Should we teach letter-writing in the classroom? Kids need to write letters and mail them. But what if they become pen pals with strangers and share private information with them? What if their letter gets lost in the mail and the wrong person opens it? Are we opening up a whole dangerous world to our students once they mail letters to others? Surely students will send thousands of letters through the mail in their lifetime.
- ☐ Should we teach email in the classroom? Kids need to email other people and should know how to title a subject. But what if they email someone bad? What if they accidentally send it to the wrong person? What will we do? And are we opening up a whole dangerous world to our students once they email others? Surely students will send thousands of emails in their lifetime.
- ☐ Should we teach (dare we say it) social media in the classroom? I mean, they don't have to learn microblogging on Twitter -- you can do that in Edmodo, right? You can have a private blog or put them on Kidblogs or Edublogs instead of letting them post long status updates on Facebook, right? Are we opening up a whole dangerous world to our students once they are writing online and posting comments to each other? Surely students will post thousands of status updates, pictures, and blogs in their lifetime.
I think it is very important to teach students how to write an email. There is an art to writing them. Especially because they can be considered record for what you have done or said. I didn’t learn how to write an email until I was in college. I had sent many before then but I didn’t know how to communicate tone through email or discern when to email and when to meet in person. I also run into teachers who do not understand the difference between reply and reply all which drives me bonkers!
It always should start with “what is your educational objective?” Why do you want students to use social media and what do you want them to use it for? Is there a better way to achieve this objective? Are the risks worth the benefits?
The Social Media Answer
- ☑ There's one form of writing that can arguably get someone fired, hired or forced to retire faster than any other form of writing. (If you don't believe me, read "How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life" in the New York Times.)
- ☑ There's one form that will most likely be read by college admissions offices and teams of student "stalkers" hired to vet students before they receive scholarships.
- ☑ There's one form that will prevent some people from running for political office and get others elected.
One form of writing is that powerful.
If you guessed social media, you're right.
The Social Media Myth
The myth about social media in the classroom is that if you use it, kids will be Tweeting, Facebooking and Snapchatting while you're trying to teach. We still have to focus on the task at hand. Don't mistake social media forsocializing. They're different -- just as kids talking as they work in groups or talking while hanging out are different.
You don't even have to bring the most popular social media sites into your classroom. You can use Fakebook or FakeTweet as students work on this form of conversation. Edublogs, Kidblog, Edmodo, and more will let you use social media competencies and writing techniques. Some teachers are even doing "tweets" on post-it notes as exit tickets. You can use mainstream social media, too.
12 Ways Teachers are Using Social Media in the Classroom Right Now
- Tweet or post status updates as a class. Teacher Karen Lirenman lets students propose nuggets of learning that are posted for parents to read.
- Write blog posts about what students are learning. Teacher Kevin Jarrettblogs reflections about his Elementary STEM lab for parents to read each week.
- Let your students write for the world. Linda Yollis' students reflect about learning and classroom happenings.
- Connect to other classrooms through social media. Joli Barker is fearlessly connecting her classroom through a variety of media.
- Use Facebook to get feedback for your students' online science fair projects. Teacher Jamie Ewing is doing this now, as he shared recently.
- Use YouTube for your students to host a show or a podcast. Don Wettrick's students hosted the Focus Show online and now share their work on a podcast.
- Create Twitter accounts for a special interest projects. My studentMorgan spent two years testing and researching the best apps for kids with autism (with the help of three "recruits"), and her work just won her an NCWIT Award for the State of Georgia.
- Ask questions to engage your students in authentic learning. Tom Barrett did this when his class studied probability by asking about the weather in various locations.
- Communicate with other classrooms. The Global Read Aloud, Global Classroom Project and Physics of the Future are three examples of how teachers use social media to connect their students as they collaborate and communicate.
- Create projects with other teachers. (Full disclosure: I co-created Physics of the Future with Aaron Maurer, a fellow educator I first met on Twitter.)
- Share your learning with the world. My students are creating anEncyclopedia of Learning Games with Dr. Lee Graham's grad students at the University of Alaska Southeast. The educators are testing the games, and the students are testing them, too.
- Further a cause that you care about. Mrs. Stadler's classes are working to save the rhinos in South Africa, and Angela Maiers has thousands of kids choosing to matter.
It's in the Standards
If you're going to ignore social media in the classroom, then throw out theISTE Standards for Students and stop pretending that you're 21st century. Stop pretending that you're helping low-income children overcome the digital divide if you aren't going to teach them how to communicate online.
Social media is here. It's just another resource and doesn't have to be a distraction from learning objectives. Social media is another tool that you can use to make your classroom more engaging, relevant and culturally diverse.
General Document Comments 0
It is crazy how much social media has taken over in the past few years. I remember when facebook got popular, and then a few years later twitter got popular, and after that it was instagram and then snapchat. I see the benefits of using social media in the classroom but also the drawbacks. I think at the age of students I teach, it would be hard to use the actual social media platforms in the classroom because the students are too young. However, relating assignments to social media makes the assignments more relatable and engaging for students. For example, students could create a fake social media profile or post to show their learning or to describe a character or person. I had seen this done before with teachers using templates of what a social media post would look like but I had never heard of resources like fakebook before, so that was interesting to read about.
It is really hard to imagine exactly where social media will go but I think the future of social media will turn much more to live posts. I think people will begin to use the live tools more and more and that the live tools will develop further. In today’s day and age, everything we do seems to be documented through social media. Documenting things live is already available but I think that will become the primary way of posting on social media in the coming years rather than traditional posts and updates.
I can definitely see ‘live’ being the big takeover!
Education is constantly changing especially with the increasing growth of technology. In order to be effective 21st century teachers, I fee like it’s important to teach and integrate social media in effective and safe ways. In the section called The Social Media Answer the article mentions how tweets, posts, and things said on social media can affect their lives when applying for scholarships or a job. With the workforce changing, I think teaching the appropriate means of using social media is necessary. I also find integrating social media can increase interest and motivation within our students. Just like Julia, I think using social media platforms should only be done at appropriate age levels. For my second graders, I find that using social media is too advanced for them. However, I liked Fakebook and Tweet thoughts for my students. I believe that integrating social media at appropriate levels and teaching social media etiquette is beneficial for students in today’s world.
I agree. Digital Citizenship is more our ‘job’.
I like the idea of social media to share ideas and strategies between teachers around the world. I like it being used as a way for schools (not teachers) to share events and information to parents. I keep my pages on private and do not accept students or parents on any of my social medias. I don’t have anything to hide; they are innocent enough to have my parents, principal, in-laws, etc, able to follow me. I do keep it PG but I never want anything to be misconstrued or an overly-friendly or less than pleased parent to be able to figure out where I work out or where my kids go to school. I know it is still possible but why make it easy? I thought the Fakebook and Faketweet websites were creative and clever ways for students to be able to share knowledge of content. I also can agree that digital citizenship is a teacher’s responsibility but I disagree that teachers should teach social media. My son is 16 and begs for Snapchat but only recently got Instagram. My 11 year old nor my husband have any social media so I know I would not appreciate a teacher thinking it is their place to be sharing the ins and out of them. That is a decision to be made at home and with no pressure from an academic standpoint. Students that do have these accounts need a break from them anyways; using them in the classroom discourages that.
The skill of emailing is as important as letter writing and should both be taught, I do agree with that. Using social media sites to (over-share), communicate, and advertise will continue to grow and reach a larger, younger audiences. I have no idea how social media is going to progress to more than what it is now besides variations of the sites already used. I think there are great ways to expose children to the people and the world outside of their reach with the use of technology but I do not think social media is the way to do it. As of right now it should remain a personal choice for what parents want to allow their children to be susceptible to and a teacher should only be given the task of helping students make best choices based on digital citizenship.
icons on the left to see existing comments.
0 archived comments