PED3155 - Social Media in Education

Hello readers,

Today's topic is the hotly-debated use of social media in the classroom - more importantly:

How will I manage the use of it in my future classrooms?

Social media is one of the biggest forces in today’s society – from connecting families across long distances, to advertising, and to helping us maintain our daily relationships we can all agree that it is difficult to disconnect when so many of us are relying on it. This becomes no exception in the classroom, given that most of our students are interacting with social media more than we probably did during our high school careers! It thus becomes important for us to examine how we interact with social media as adults as well as how our students are using their social media as it is a major influence on the well-being of most teenagers.

In the right hands, social media is a powerful tool to help students organize their social lives. Keeping connected with their friend groups hours after seeing them in person helps them maintain their social networks with simple movements of the thumb. Students are also capable of forming groups to help organize their thoughts for different classes, both offering and asking for help, and connecting with group members to complete groupwork with ease. The ability to share work and work collaboratively has opened up many avenues for students to complete projects, not mentioning that it helps make certain tasks more accessible to more students (such as those with social anxiety, for example). To top it all off, teachers are able to curate their online presence to allow parents to learn about their students’ teachers without having to engage in conversations in person or over the phone.

However, social media is as much of a force for good as it is for evil. Social media rewards those who use it quickly and often, which in turn creates an avenue for students to disengage in class. Additionally, cyber bullying is one of the biggest threats a student may face when interacting with their peers online and the ease of accessing social media provides bullies quick access to their victims at any time. This, in turn, can lead to the student disengaging from their social and academic life far from the view of the teacher or the principal. This creates an invisible barrier to success in the classroom that is difficult to diagnose and even harder to resolve.

It then becomes a challenge for the modern teacher to find a way to address it – is a policy of tolerance or a total ban a feasible option? An extreme option may alienate a given population of your students, which is something an adaptive expert is actively striving against. I believe that social media has a time and place – most notably, in classrooms that push the concept of connecting with your peers and working on problems with them, social media can often disconnect them from the “now”. A flexible model that teaches students that social media should be used only when one is on their own may help in the creation of a “safe space,” both from the pressures of society and their peers. In my classroom, I hope to impart the knowledge that social media often does not help a student in their learning and as such it should be used at their discretion (which ideally would manifest as only during seatwork). While there are many uses for social media, I stand by the fact that there are very few that students can glean when a lesson is in progress!

Photo credit: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/16154/the-rise-and-fall-of-text-messaging-in-schools

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