Social Media in Education

Social Media in Education

Social Media and Teachers

The topic that I chose to explore was social media for teachers. Why should teachers use social media? What are the benefits? What are the responsibilities of teachers? In a world where social media is more prevalent than ever, I thought this would be an interesting topic to dive deeper into. The @DavidGeurin Blog was the first place that I went because his post “7 Reasons to Use Social Media in Your School” sounded like it would be an interesting read. I was excited to see that he summed up his article with a great infographic! 

Image Source: The @DavidGeurin Blog 

My district focuses a lot on the parent-teacher partnership. I love the idea of incorporating social media into the classroom as a way to engage with parents and show off their student’s work. I also love the idea of using social media in the classroom as a way to promote positive messages. There is so much negativity in the world these days and typically social media contributes to that negativity. Teaching students that social media can be used to spread the positive messages that we teach in the classroom is a great way to start to make a change for the future of social media. This blog post and infographic made me realize that a lot of the social media use I was using, was when we were doing remote learning. I found myself to be fatigued of social media and digital platforms once we returned to the classroom in person and a lot of what I was posting stopped. Now that I have taken a break, I feel ready to jump back into my classroom social media usage. I like how connected to the classroom it makes parents feel! 

After exploring the “7 Reasons to Use Social Media in Your School” blog post, it sparked an interest in me to read the article titled “How to prepare kids for social media use” from CNN Health. While this article was interesting to me, it confirmed what I already knew versus teaching me new information. This article mentioned the importance of teaching kids accountability, digital citizenship, and teaching them that what they post is permanent. This reminded me a lot of the data mine that I conducted and the conversations about digital footprints versus digital tattoos. In my last post, I mentioned the importance of teachers educating students on digital tattoos and this reading reaffirmed that belief.