How Social Media is Reshaping Today’s Education System
Starting
from elementary school up until university graduation, social media has the
role to empower parents, students and teachers to use new ways of sharing
information and build a community. Statistics show that 96% of the students
that have internet access are using at least one social network. What’s
even more extraordinary is that, even though some of the students use the
social networks for entertaining and other purposes, there are a lot of them
that actually use it to promote a lot of positive and useful activities. From
finding a summer internship, promoting a success story about how to win the
student-loan battle or collaborate on international projects, everything is
made possible.
Implementation
in Schools:
When
it comes to social media, schools tend to adopt different positions. It’s a
general consensus that they’re useful when it comes to sharing information or
organizing the school tasks. And at the same time, social networking is blamed
for the lack of attention in students during classes.
But
an increasing trend of adopting social media in school is starting to show. And
since students already devote a lot of time for social media and connecting
with others outside school hours, why not do it during school as well?
It’s
a matter of practicability, really, because it makes perfect sense to use the
online universe to communicate with your students since they’re already there
most of the time. There’s no need for another case study about the usage
of social media in schools. You simply need to walk through the
hallways of any school or colleague to see kids of all ages totally immersed in
their smartphones. Browsing their news feed, sharing photos on Instagram of
sending Snapchat messages has become a part of their daily routine.
How
Can Teachers Penetrate the Online World?
Moodle
and Blackboard are just two examples of a learning management system
that involves online learning for more than 10 years now. Slowly but steady,
such systems will lead to the actual implementation of social media within
classrooms. And the best tool available for teachers is social media itself.
Only by being open-minded and using the technology themselves will they be able
to really reach out to students.
“The
best teachers I’ve ever had have used technology to enhance the learning
process, including Facebook pages and events for upcoming projects” – Katie
Benmar, Freshman
As
the above statement emphasizes, students also react very positively when a
teacher is willing to use their methods and adapt them as part of the
educational process. And it makes perfect sense since homework has a certain
strictness about it, but an online chat discussing a certain book gives
students the ability to open up and share their opinions.
Daring Teachers:
“We live in a digital ecosystem, and it is vital that educational institutions adapt”
Of course,
the examples of teachers already implementing social media in classes are far
numerous that we can know of, however, there are a few that did such a great
job that their students almost made them viral. For example, a biology teacher
from Bergen County proposed a challenge to his students. They had to debate
over the subject of meiosis on Twitter by using a specific hashtag. This is a
great opportunity for students to have fun and learn at the same time. As you
need to know your meiosis in order to compress it into 140 characters.
A
Stronger Community Through Social Media:
The
benefits of social media in the education process doesn’t have to stop at the
teacher-student relationship. There are a lot of other benefits that can be
extracted from the use of social networking at higher levels as well. For
example, principals or administrators can find a new way to integrate social
media. Like sharing school news via social networks, holding an online meeting
with the parents or even starting fundraising for different projects.
And
social media can quickly become the only channel of communication since we’re
living fast-paced lives, parents are usually busy with work and cannot attend
school meetings. But this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in touch with events
or be able to check on their kids every once in a while. Just like in every
other field, communication is vital and if it can be done easily with the help
of social media, why not go for it?
It
may not be criteria just yet, but soon enough questions like ‘Does this school
have a Facebook page?’ could become just as important as the things that
parents are asking right now. Like, how well equipped the library is or what
are the optional classes their child can be part of.
Conclusions:
The bottom
line is that social media is a big part of our day to day life and there’s no
point of keeping it away from the education process. School, college and
university staff should be encouraged to make use of technology for student and
parent communication. This could easily turn into an argumentative essay
topic for college. But the benefits are obvious, starting with healthier
parent-teacher relationships and all the way to permanently changing the way
our children will learn.
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