Social Media In the Classroom

Should We Or Shouldn't We?

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Most people would agree that social media is a major part of our students' lives.  Where there may be some dissent is on whether teachers should incorporate social media in the classroom, and if so, to what extent?  In light of the recent high-profile news story of the Parkland student who had his Harvard admission revoked due to racist comments made online, I decided to take a look an an article on not only using social media in the classroom as a tool, but teaching social media use as well.

The Article

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The article I read was "A Guidebook for Social Media in the Classroom" by Vicki Davis.  Here is a link to the article on Edutopia.org.  The opening of the article was very effective in drawing me in to the writer's point of view that social media should be used as another tool in the classroom; it is aligned very closely with my belief that it is unrealistic to expect our students to know how to do something until we teach it to them.  While up to this point I had always said that in regards to behavior and rule following, the Hidden Curriculum, or other face-to-face social interactions, it makes perfect sense that this way of thinking should extend to digital social exchanges like the many social media interactions our students have on a daily basis.  The article wrote (in 2014!) of the power social media had to get people hired, fired, admitted, denied, or considered for political office, which rings especially true today.  

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Uses In the Classroom

This concise article has a ton of great examples packed into it of how to get social media.  I won't repeat them all here, but it really impacted me to see social media tied directly to the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)'s student standards for digital citizenship.  I was already open to the idea of using social media to connect with subject matter experts all over the world and to bring more authenticity to the lesson at hand, but I had never really considered the importance of teaching the how's and why's of social media use actively to students.  I particularly liked the idea of using post-it notes as practice tweet exit tickets while teaching the students how to communicate in the medium--I definitely plan on doing this with my students next year!