Social media in the classroom

Hello everybody, today I’m going to give my opinion about if it is necessary to integrate social media in the classroom or not and how I can use some of the forums to be a better teacher. Earlier in the year we did an assignment about the different technologies in the classroom during specific times. The class were divided into groups and each group were given a period to do research on and come and present it in the class. Me and my group were lucky, seeing that we had to do the period in which the internet, interactive whiteboard and YouTube were. So now you can see why I say we were lucky.

Seeing that technology grow so fast nowadays and that almost everybody, even schoolchildren, got access to the internet but specifically social media I don’t think it’s necessary to implement social media in the classroom but it would be a great benefit if it would get integrated. There can be advantages as well as disadvantages when it comes to social media in the classroom. Social media can encourage learners to attend classes because learners are nowadays crazy about social media or sometimes they don’t like how a teacher is giving class but then social media comes to the rescue. A lot of subject knowledge can be covered through social media. It also helps students but also teachers seeing that they can communicate across the world with other teachers and students and asks or gets help from them.

Some of the disadvantages are that students can get like addicted to social media, so if they know that they won’t be using social media, they will just stay absent for that day. In other words they get too much dependant on social media when it comes to their schoolwork. Another disadvantage of social media can be that the knowledge on the social media can sometimes be inaccurate. One last disadvantage that I want to share is that both the teacher and students get so dependent on social media that the teacher, him-/herself, don’t deliver such great classes when they actually teach again. They get sloppy in their work.

So now the question is: how can I, as a prospective teacher, use these forums to be a better teacher. First of all, I would use these forums in my classes but I won’t be using it so regularly. Maybe once a week or every second week and also only if they prove to me that they’re actually learning. And then I won’t be using it on the same day each time. The reason why is because I don’t want to follow a pattern so that learners can pick up on which days I’m gonna be using it. So my strategy would work like this: I start a topic using social media and see what they got to say about it. Then during the next few days I’ll be giving my lessons and at the end of the topic I do a short assessment to see if the learners understand it and had actually learned something. At the end of the topic, just to make it exciting for the learners we can communicate through social media with other teachers and learners to hear what they have to say about the topic and how they’d experience it. I think this strategy will motivate the learners to learn cause if they prove to me that they didn’t learned there won’t be any social media in the classroom anymore.

So teachers as well as prospective teachers, be carefull of how you want to implement social media in your classroom. It can be fun for the learners but they can also get addicted to it as you had just read. So my advice will be to don’t let social media get the upper hand but use it wisely.