Incoporating Social Media into the Classroom

9 Ways to Use Social Media in your Classroom

Michael-Ann Cerniglia discusses in her article the importance of incorporating social media into the classroom that encourages critical thinking skills and engagement.  Since it can be overwhelming integrating many new tools into the classroom at the beginning of the year, she proposes 9 methods for each of the 9 months in the school year.

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• Students (and yourself!) pick a social media site and topic to follow 
• Blog accounts are set up for each student and they post and comment on each others accounts
• Twitter accounts are set up for each student and a class hashtag is created to post quick homework assignments
• Scoop.it can be used to follow current news and then students can comment summaries of the articles
• Students can use Pinterest to pin classroom assignments to a virtual board
• Tumblr can be used by students to manage blogs and updates in the classroom
• Allow students to use their cameras to take pictures when they are participating in activities or on field trips and then have them post and caption the images on social media accounts
• Use Skype meaningfully by linking into classrooms around the world based on teaching topic or interests
• Generate discussions using Dipity or Tiki-toki timeline platforms to collaborate on a timeline at the same time

New Personal Ideas Generated from Article

The main take-away from this article for me was understanding the importance of teaching students the educational uses of public social media.  When social media is used in an educational manner it is more applicable and long-lasting.  The social media accounts discussed in the article are resources that I'm already familiar with, but I received new ideas on how to incorporate them differently in the classroom.  For instance, I'm already a consistent user of Pinterest; however, I have not thought about using this social media account in the classroom before.  I have seen this website more as a resource to my teaching, but I really enjoy the idea of creating a class board where students and parents are involved in order to display their work and accomplishments.  Another idea I plan on using with my students next school year is using their phones more to document their learning through images.  Most of my students love being on their phone; therefore providing them the opportunity to take pictures and include summaries of their work not only provides the opportunity for students to reflect on their learning, but also create documentation of student growth throughout the year. 

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After a professional development workshop or graduate school class I can become overwhelmed with all the ideas because I want to incorporate each concept into my classroom, but this is not a reasonable or realistic task to do all at once.  I really like the idea of picking one new social media resource to integrate into the classroom each month.  This not only is a reasonable task, but switches up the instruction for students in order to maintain and increase engagement.