Social media and education

Social media and education

Social media have vitalized the peripheral effects of social networks, as they have made them more extensive, more dynamic and more affecting. These are the trends that make the potential educational effects of social media serious and inevitable, even when institutionalized education has tended to ban them from the classroom. Nowadays, we have many tools developing rapidly and being widely used, such as blogs, wikis, Skype, chat rooms, discussion forums, social networking tools, etc. The teachers need certain degree of technical proficiency to organize these online tools. Facebook and other social media have been hailed as delivering the promise of new, socially engaged educational experiences for students in undergraduate, self-directed, and other educational sectors. The best way to make progress in the future is to have experts and teachers identify a set of notions and sub skills that would allow teachers to roughly estimate their learners’ mastery level and develop compensation programmes for them.

Social media raise our awareness that human intellect is not only an individual asset, and they highlight the importance of crowd-sourcing and distributed cognition. Social media have entered education because of students’ need to keep in contact with their peer group, and not necessarily only with their classmates. Social media in the school are not yet a sustainable solution for the traditional problems of education. However, they provide opportunities that are changing the way we learn.(UNESCO)

Teachers professional and personal necessity to see if social media such as Facebook, that normally occupy a relevant part of my pupils' daily life outside school, could actually enter school and become an interesting didactical tool. We need classrooms that challenge traditional models and reverse the hierarchy, allow young people to communicate and collaborate, that provide an authentic audience for children’s work and exist within systems that are both open and transparent.

Reasons why teachers should use social media in learning and education

•         Social media make collaboration between teachers possible. This makes their work much more interesting and rewarding.

•         Social media can encourage schools to become less isolated and boost learning beyond the school walls.

•         Social media can have an impact on whole-school communication, pedagogical approaches and staff professional development.

•         Teachers should encourage students to use social media, not only for fun, but also for education and information purposes.

•         Teachers can take up the task of conducting selections for foreign exchange programs on social media communities of the school.

•         Social media offer an endless range of creative possibilities. For instance, the teacher can ask students to make a video about the topics she teach, and encourage them to share their homework with other classmates on YouTube.

•         Social media inspire teachers and social media is the way to go to improve their teaching.

•         Share learning with students, parents and community. Institution’s parent social media account should be kept for sharing updates regarding their daily activities

•         Social media encourage students to share work socially.

•         Social media work on the level of the individual students, engaging their attention to immediate and contextual concerns, such as current events, social activities and prospective employment, so teachers can ensure the students professional development.

•         Create student engagement opportunities – Photo essays, caption writing etc.

•         Social media help to develop connection with other teachers, experts and students.

Lynne O Brien recommending the following Six Ways to Use Social Media in Education

1.      Share new information with classmates or groups as part of formal and informal education.

2.      Gathering and sharing data collected with mobile devices during field trips.

3.      Creating a public profile to showcase personal research interests and to connect with a broad audience

4.      Using Twitter in class to keep students engaged and to get a sense of what students are thinking about during lectures

5.      Forming student study groups with the use of Google+ Hangouts and other social tools

6.      Adding social tools to e-textbooks