Be Social

Last semester, I explored the article The Social Media Teacher – Do’s and Don’ts. Since I never had thought about the area of social media in the classroom I felt this was a good place to begin. Below are my summaries and conclusions about the Do’s and Don’ts presented. I am including these in this blog posts as well because I think it’s a quick, good reminder for anyone about to indulge in social media in the classroom for the first time.

Borrowed from Positive Results Marketing 

The Do’s:

• Spice up your classroom – The can enhance writing skills through new areas such as blogging, instead of an old tactic like journaling.
• Get yourself involves – You may consider having a page yourself as the teacher in the social media site you choose. This allows you to post assignments, discussion topics, or leave comments on student work.
• Set up a monitoring system – A teacher needs to understand how he or she will make sure that the language and conversations going on online are appropriate. A teacher should also make sure that there are no online dangers to their students.
• Personal Learning Network - The use of other resources and people to connect and share ideas!

The Don’ts:

• Forget about online reputation management - It’s important to keep personal and professional life separate.  You also have to consider about the content your students are posting and how they will be a representation of themselves, your class, and the school.
• Become stagnant - A teacher should do their best to keep their educational social media site active and engaging. Once a teacher becomes inactive, students may loose interest and attention.
• Try and do too much - Educators must understand their limits and be prepared to manage a social media site to the best of their abilities.
• Forget traditional teaching - Social media should be used in collaboration to enhance traditional learning, not to replace traditional learning completely.

This semester however, I’d like to focus more on a new article, 9 Ways to Use Social Media in Your Classroom. Now that I’ve reminded myself of the Do’s and Don’ts, how can I actually engage in social media with my students in the classroom? This article intrigued me because right away I felt like I related to it. It starts with an introduction of the overwhelming feelings of anxiety that teachers can have when it comes to not only starting a new school year, but also including a new instructional strategy in that school year. Yes! I can relate to that.

It then continued with its 9 tips for bringing social media into the classroom. Below are the nine points the article suggests. I’ve explained a few in of these tips in greater detail and how I would use them in my specific classroom. 

Borrowed from Top Education Degrees 

• Get Social. I feel like the most beneficial way my classroom could get social would be to set up a classroom account on Twitter where we follow the authors of our books throughout Literature class. We could try posting questions or comments to the author. I think the students would love logging into this once a week and seeing what contact we’ve had.
• Blog. Each week, sometimes twice a week, students are required to journal. Instead of using the “notes” application on their iPad I could have them journal their responses in an online blog. Then their classmates could actually respond to their blogs.
•  Tweet.
•  Scoop.
•  Pin. Pinterest could be used to develop a board of potential lesson plans or a board that has to do with a specific topic. For example, we just finished a unit on weather in science class. We could create a Pinterest board with different images of weather, videos on weather, worksheets to complete about weather, maps and weather graphs, etc.
• Tumbl.
• Point and Shoot.
• Skype.
• Time it. A timeline platform can be used to discuss the events of a Civil War. This allows students to discuss and contribute to the same timeline during class.

Borrowed from Awe Learning 

This article provided me with small, easy tips to help adjusting my teaching style and incorporate social media into my instruction. I'm excited to implement this ideas, while remembering my do's and don'ts!