Social Media in the Classroom

In this day and age, students are more familiar with media than most of their teachers. As a teacher, why not use that to your advantage? In order to get students to learn, teachers first need to engage them in the subject matter and make them care about what they are learning...what better way to do that than to use social media? There are thousands of ways that teachers can be creative and use social media appropriately in their classrooms to promote student learning. For example, you can have each student create a private Twitter account for a particular character from history and have a classroom debate on a historical issue through the web. This is a great way to include those students' opinions who may not like speaking up in front of their peers. Through the anonymity of a Twitter feed, they may feel more comfortable to post their honest ideas and feelings about a particular issue rather than voicing their thoughts in front of the whole class. If used appropriately and effectively, social media has endless benefits to enhance student engagement and learning in the classroom.

Students also need to actually learn how to use social media. They need to learn about things like online privacy and cyberbullying before they create social media accounts; unfortunately many students do not understand the true hazards that social media entails. In this age of the Internet, is it the teacher's responsibility to teach them about these things? Maybe not, but if the students are at least being exposed to these issues in the safe environment of a classroom then they can learn to take more precautions at home.

We can't avoid using technology in the classroom any longer. The world is constantly advancing technology and, whether we like it or not, this is the age of technology. Five-year-olds have iPhones and ten-year-olds have laptops... it is time to face that reality. Technology does not need to take over the classroom..it shouldn't! But there are so many ways that technology can be incorporated into the classroom to enhance learning and engagement. Our students do not know anything besides technology; this is the world they have grown up in. As teachers, we must embrace what they know, educate ourselves, and use these tools to further our own teaching practices.