Social Media in the Classroom

Students are connected through social media more than ever these days, and often social media can be our biggest competition to hold student attention. Can social media and instructional time exist in harmony? I say a wholehearted YES! Social media can be a powerful tool to engage your students, but you have to know how to incorporate it in a meaningful way.

Instagram

A fellow teacher I know is on Instagram as @grammarqueen1. She posts pictures of grammar errors in public to let her students see how uneducated you look when you make these types of errors. She even lets her students turn in photos to her to post. Her students love it when their picture is shared, but they love it even more when they are the first one to identify the error.

Facebook

The same teacher mentioned above also has a bell ringer activity that she has named "Facebook Friday." On Fridays (obviously) She posts a series of real Facebook comments and/or post that have come across her newsfeed with spelling and grammar errors. The names are blacked out to protect the innocent. Her students must find and correct all of the errors. She has said that sometimes she will even put a Facebook Friday question on a test. I love this application of  Facebook in a practical way.

Facebook could also be used to connect with students (or parents depending on the age of your kids), but personally, I like to keep my school life and my personal life a little more separated than that. I would rather use Edmodo or Google Classroom to connect with my students.

Twitter

I used twitter in my student teaching classroom, and my students loved it! I used it mainly as an exit slip where students summarized what they learned from that day's Socratic seminar. As a class, we would come up with a hashtag for the novel we were reading. I required that I be tagged in tweets and that they include the novel hashtag. Students told me that it could be challenging to summarize with only 140 characters, but it made them think carefully about their word choice, and the tweets were usually very creative.

In this article, Kristen Wideen shares how she created a class Twitter account and allows her students to post what they are learning. I found the article to be super inspiring, and I am considering incorporating Twitter into my classroom in this manner.

YouTube

YouTube is by far the social media channel I use the most in my classroom. I use it to show TED Talks, poetry recordings, music that connects to the theme in literature, etc. Basically, if there is a video in my lesson it generally comes from YouTube.

This year, though, I want to move away from just using YouTube as a way to show videos to enhance learning. Yes, I will still use it to add multi-media to lessons, but I want it to be more focused on my class. I am planning to create screencasts of presentations and upload them to a class account so that students can review material. YouTube can also be a great platform for students to create and share their own videos.

What social media do you use in your classroom? Has anyone found a way for SnapChat to have a place in your teaching? I am interested to hear and learn from all of you.