Social Media in the Classroom. Yay or Nay
Social media in the classroom sounds great in theory, but I'm not sure if it's great. Personally, I haven't had success with it. This week I read, "Towards an understanding of social media use in the classroom: a literature review" by Antonie Van Den Beemt, Marieke Thurlings, and Myrthe Willems. The first line resonated with me. "Many teachers appear to struggle with the tension between possible pedagogical use and the tempting distraction of this technology."(Van Den Beemt et al., 2019) I struggle with the use because I see firsthand students being distracted by technology. Ever since COVID-19 students now use laptops in a class all the time. I'll walk around and see students off task. It's so hard when you have the internet at your fingertips.
I think it has to do with the student's maturity level. For example, in this class, we are using social media in all sorts of ways. I don't find myself getting distracted, but if I tried this class approach with my students. They wouldn't be able to handle it. I'd probably see them off task. I wish I could implement it, but I'm just not so sure.
Has anyone been able to successfully use social media in their classroom/workplace?
Van Den Beemt, A., Thurlings, M., & Willems, M. (2019). Towards an understanding of social media use in the classroom: A literature review. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 29(1), 35–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/1475939x.2019.1695657
Melanie you have asked the million dollar question here. It's so difficult to incorporate social media in the classroom because the students don't understand how to use it for learning. They know that they can watch a cute video on TikTok or post a picture on Instagram, but they don't see that as learning, they see it as fun. I think in order to successfully implement social media in the classroom takes very explicit instruction on what you are using an how you expect it to be used. We cannot be vague, expectations have to be clear and enforced. I allowed my students to use YouTube videos to review skills they had forgotten, but we had a whole lesson on what you could do, and couldn't do. I also made it easy for them by curating the videos for them. Sometimes as teachers we forget that kids don't automatically know how to do some of the things we ask them to do. We have to scaffold the process until they can do things on their own. The hope is that eventually they will be technologically literate.
ReplyDeleteYes very on-point question! The Tired Teacherʻs response made me think about a previous reading for this class (I believe) when a teacher involved the students in creating the lesson materials. Newish territory navigated by precise direction from the instructor. I do wonder if social media in the classroom poses a uniquely nuanced challenge in that how much the teacher can plan for pushes up against how open social networking sites can be. But perhaps specifically curating accounts for students to use or other measures like that would offset the openness?
ReplyDeleteHi Melanie, I thought you raised a very interesting point in your post. Similar to you, I think that social media should be implemented in the classroom. I'm of the view that social media is one of the greatest educational tools of all time, and yet, it goes untaught. Why? Fear of the unknown? Lack of value? The time is now for education to instead embrace this form of learning and begin, even in small ways, embedding social media usage in all classrooms.
ReplyDeleteThere was a discussion post like this on Canvas, and I am really leaning towards the idea to have a bubble around schools, allowing them to work within their designated systems, being virtually connected with other bubbles of schools, for most of their online time and then having blocks of time where they can open the system to access the larger internet. I don't understand why there aren't separate internets available and why its just 'THE WORLD WIDE WEB'.
ReplyDeleteWhat about AMERICAN YOUTH WEB? I'm going to go off on a tangent the more I think about it...