Social Media as a Teaching and Learning Tool
Social media has emerged as a significant tool in education, particularly due to its widespread use among young people. Educators are increasingly adopting various social media platforms to engage with students, facilitate collaboration, and enhance research methods. These platforms provide educators with innovative ways to communicate and share resources, ultimately promoting professional development among teachers. However, the integration of social media in the classroom presents challenges, including potential distractions for students and concerns over cyberbullying and inappropriate interactions between students and teachers.
Despite these concerns, many educators are recognizing the benefits of social media as a medium for critical thinking and media literacy. Assignments that require students to analyze their social media usage or understand the impact of influencers are becoming more common. Furthermore, some teachers leverage social media to prepare students for future workforce participation, teaching them about online reputation management and appropriate digital communication. As the educational landscape evolves, the effective use of social media remains a dynamic conversation, with a need for educators to balance its advantages and potential drawbacks.
Social Media as a Teaching and Learning Tool
Abstract
In part because of greater social media participation rates among young people, its effects on the education system have been especially noteworthy. Educators have begun to embrace various social media platforms not only for their personal use but also as a tool to connect with their students and to help their students collaborate with one another. Social media is also helping educators find new ways for students to conduct research because the information that people share in online communities represents a largely untapped source of data, though students must learn how to evaluate social media sources.
Overview
In part because of greater social media participation rates among young people, its effects on the education system have been especially noteworthy. Educators have begun to embrace various social media platforms not only for their personal use but also as a tool to connect with their students and to help their students collaborate with one another. Social media is also helping educators find new ways for students to conduct research because the information that people share in online communities represents a largely untapped source of data, though students must learn how to evaluate social media sources.
Social media has presented something of a mixed blessing for schools and teachers. It has a number of disadvantages that, at first, caused educators to be cautious about its use. One problem is that social media presents an additional distraction for many young people, who may prefer to spend their time interacting with their peers online instead of focusing on their studies. Social media also raises concerns among school administrators because it represents another medium in which some students will inevitably choose to behave irresponsibly. Incidents in which students are bullied by their peers on social media sites, as well as cases where students post threats of school violence on social media, have become items that regularly appear in the news media. There have also been incidents in which inappropriate relationships between educators and students are fostered through social media's tendency to flatten hierarchies and make people more accessible to one another.
Still, these problems are the exception rather than the norm. Most users of social media behave appropriately, and as society has adjusted to the availability of social media as a form of interaction, educators have begun to find innovative methods of putting online networks to work. One of the first ways in which social media was found to support education is in its ability to assist educators in communicating with one another, share ideas, offer advice, and learn from one another about how to better serve their students.
Applications
From the earliest days of personal computers, teachers have been pioneers in this regard, building websites for their colleagues, sharing lesson plans online, and emailing one another to organize professional conferences. The arrival of social media has made this process much easier than it was in the past. Teachers can, in a matter of minutes, research who the best-known experts on a subject are, organize an online group to include them, and begin sharing ideas. In the past, this might have taken weeks or months.
Apart from communication among professional educators, social media also represents another topic for instructors to teach students about. Because part of educating students includes helping them to develop the critical thinking skills necessary to evaluate media rather than blindly consume it, many educators are making social media the focus of at least part of their coursework. Just as students must be able to listen to news reports and read newspapers and magazines to be able to extract, evaluate, and synthesize information, they must be shown how to use that same lens of critical inquiry when they use X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social networking sites.
To help this process along, teachers will occasionally assign students to, for example, devote one day to counting the number of advertisements they see while using social media. This helps raise students' awareness that much of what they see on social media is there because companies want it to be seen and that ads are purchased in online forums with that goal in mind. Another common task is for students to spend a day counting the number of hours they spend on social media, the number of times they reach for their cell phones, and the number of times they post something on a social media site. This assignment also seeks to raise awareness of the extent of a student's own social media use because if a person is not aware of their usage and in control of it, they are, in a very real sense, controlled by it. Teachers should also allow students to determine the effects of social media influencers on their consumer behavior, allowing them to understand another way social media can exert control over their lives.
Teachers who are the most comfortable with social media have gone beyond using it as a professional tool and helping their students to evaluate its role in their lives by incorporating social media into their own instructional practices. This often takes the form of an assignment that requires students to use social media in a particular way. Examples include opening a Twitter account and locating followers who are experts on a particular subject, creating a Facebook group in order to collaborate on an assignment with other classmates, and interacting with other classes of students across the country or across the world. Often this last type of assignment is used with language instruction, as it gives students in different countries the chance to interact with native speakers of the language they are learning.
Using social media for instruction requires that the teacher be adept with the selected social media platform, understanding how it works, its limitations, and strengths. The teacher must also manage the students as they navigate the online environment and ensure they behave appropriately with one another. In a sense, using social media to support content learning in this way is not significantly different from an instructor taking her class on a field trip—the teacher must guide the group, make sure everyone is safe, behaving properly, and paying attention to what they are supposed to be learning.
Viewpoints
Some in the education community have resisted the inclusion of social media in the educational experience. Social media involves a different form of communication than many people are used to. In the past, information was disseminated in controlled ways, typically using a "one-to-many" distribution method. Under such a method, an information outlet (typically a television or radio station or a newspaper publisher) would gather information, use it to produce a coherent report of events, and then broadcast its reports to the public by means of radio and television signals and newspapers. Each person received the same information at the same time, and there was no convenient means of discussing the information on a large scale.
In contrast, social media is thought of as a "many to many" information dissemination medium. Every person on social media is able to broadcast information to all people in their network, and each of these recipients is free to respond or to pass the message along to their own network, in effect creating a large, continuously spreading conversation. Instead of simply receiving information, members of social media sites are constantly participating in its generation and distribution. Many educators find this type of online environment too chaotic and stress-inducing, and they may have a difficult time simply navigating social media on their own, much less using it to teach others.
Others embrace what they call social media's egalitarian atmosphere because the ability for teachers and students to interact with one another online and to share information has had the effect of reducing some of the barriers that often separate these groups, flattening the educational hierarchy and making learning itself a many-to-many conversation even within a single classroom, with students communicating together to help one another construct their understanding of the world. Once students become accustomed to having this sort of freedom to participate in their own learning, it can help to increase their motivation to participate in a class and to expand their own horizons. Part of this has to do with the fact that because social media sites are built upon technology, using smartphones and computers in constantly changing ways, students are often more adept at its use than their teachers. For some students, this advantage in technological skill over their instructors can give them a sense of accomplishment and build their faith in their own ability to learn and discover new things. A student that has a habit of tuning out traditional lectures is surprisingly engaged when given the chance to help the class and the teacher figure out how to use Twitter in order to learn more about a subject. A watchful teacher can use this to their advantage by drawing the reluctant learner into the lesson with the lure of technology and social media. The student is fully engaged and excited about what the class is learning together.
Many teachers are also using social media with their students because of the unique ways it can help to prepare them to participate in the workforce as adults. Lessons of this sort may require students to construct online profiles that are intended to accomplish specific results, such as obtaining a job. This can be an important way to convey to students how important it is to think about how one comes across in online communication. People are familiar with the idea that "you never get a second chance to make a first impression," but online interactions are new enough in social relations that many people have yet to realize that the content they post online—photographs, status updates, or comments on political issues—will almost certainly stay online in some form permanently, despite their best efforts to remove it later. Inasmuch as part of teachers' role, in addition to content instruction in core subjects, is to prepare students for the world of adulthood, it is crucial to include in students' lessons some time devoted to online reputation management. This may involve building a resume using a site such as LinkedIn, reviewing one's online history to spot issues that could potentially be a source of concern in the future, and learning the niceties of online communication (where one must keep in mind that sarcasm and other means of communication are often not perceptible in the absence of nonverbal cues).
Some educators and parents have voiced atypical concerns about social media use in education. While most such concerns have to do with cyberbullying and the distracting effects of social media, there are occasionally concerns raised about the extent to which the use of social media in education may further discourage young people from interacting with one another directly, or in person. Those who express this view tend to see technology in general as having a widespread effect of isolating people from one another.
It is one of the ironies of the Internet that even while it allows people on different continents to communicate with one another easily, it also takes away time that one might otherwise spend directly interacting with friends, family, and neighbors. Teachers who use social media must keep in mind the need to remind students that, as with most activities, moderation is the key to success.
As social media evolved in the 2010s and 2020s, a new issue affecting the information students glean from social media began to become apparent—the spread of disinformation or “fake news.” Often people obtain information from friends and people they trust in social media, just as they would do in real life. This is called cognitive bias. Cognitive bias is exacerbated by social media which is harmful when the information is false. This user may post and spread the false information to others, or he may seek out more information on the Internet that seems to confirm the false information. Students are exceptionally susceptible to cognitive bias given their stage in life. Compounding this problem is the amount of information available on social media and the ease and speed with which it spreads. Further, students need to be made aware that personalities on social media are often “bots,” computer-generated users.
Terms & Concepts
Cyberbullying: The use of online communication technologies to systematically harass someone, often in the presence of other members of an online community. There have been many cases of students cyberbullying one another, sometimes with tragic consequences. This trend has caused schools to develop programs to educate youth about the fact that bullying is still bullying, even if it happens online, and that it is behavior that will not be tolerated.
Mobile technologies: Portable computing devices, as opposed to desktop personal computers. Virtually all social media is designed to be used from mobile devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, and laptops. Some social media sites use the geolocation features of these mobile devices to enhance user experiences, for example, to see if any of their friends are nearby and interested in meeting for lunch.
Privacy: A key issue for any person using social media, whether professionally or personally, is privacy. The basic purpose of social media is to share information about oneself with others, but most people do not want to share everything about themselves with everyone they know. Instead, users wish to control who sees what. Privacy issues in social media often have to do with information mistakenly being shared with unintended recipients or intercepted by third parties.
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