"If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow."
- John Dewey
In the hopes of keeping my primitive technological background under wraps, I will start by saying I matriculated before Facebook was in full swing. It was the time when MySpace was still the go-to social media platform and (needless to say) Twitter and Instgram were still unborn ideas in the minds of their creators. It is with these premises that I have always imagined school as a technologically challenged domain... But it has no reason to be! With technology and DigPed tools readily available on so many levels, we are able to integrate social media techniques into even the most technologically deprived school environments. I believe it is important to guide our learners and enable them to use networking platforms to their advantage.
From Day 1 of the PGCE course, we have been encouraged time and again to "clean-up" our Facebook and Twitter profiles, in order to create a more "hirable" persona for the profile-stalking job sharks. This could imply that we use a pseudonym for our social profiles or simply ensure that we keep our current profiles free from any undesirable content. Whatever the case may be, if it will aid our learners to excel and succeed in the technology-driven modern world, why shouldn't we encourage and therefore teach our learners to be techno-savvy (is this term even used anymore) from the get-go?!
Take it from someone whose friend experienced a real-life "catfish" situation. The techno-generation need to learn how to identify falsified personalities when they encounter them and how to protect themselves against them. With this in mind, I am all-in for teaching with social media if it means assuming the 'in loco parentis' role and improving the cyber-safety of our learners.
Let's address the "Social Media Myth"... As a generation Y teacher-in-training, you cannot deny that you browse your Instagram, Facebook or Twitter newsfeed at least once in a day filled with lectures from dawn to dusk. How then can we expect the next generation to leave this at the metaphorical classroom door?! Because, let's face it, it's going to happen one way or another, whether we like it or not. Then, since it's going to happen anyway, why not benefit from it and use social media as part of your DigPed tools? And while Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat may not necessarily be the best tools, there are educational equivalents available to bridge the communication divide and build a connection between you and your students. This will hopefully provide learners with the essential tools required to stop and think before posting an impulsively overcritical comment or status on their preferred social media platform.
Provenzano and @coolcatteacher suggest numerous benefits for using social media in the classroom, but I personally loved the demonstration @kijiaoshou gave us. I think it will be highly advantageous for you to be able to test your students' knowledge by having them tweet answers to contextual questions using an allocated #hashtag. This will enable you to check their understanding of the subject matter.
These are just a few examples of how social media could be effective in the classroom and we shouldn't hide from it purely because we were not taught in this manner... We should rather embrace change and teach our learners to to use these social media platforms in a careful and thought-out manner.
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