Social Media in Education This workshop will introduce how to incorporate social media tools into learning activities. When used properly, social media tools can boost student engagement, link students to content experts, find online classroom lessons, and help them establish an online body of work/establish their brand.
90% of college students visit social networking sites on a regular basis
Social learning is learners learning from each other
Today's students want to document their feelings and insights in a highly timely manner
Social learning can increase comprehension of material and create new channels for students to learn.
WHY IS SOCIAL LEARNING IMPORTANT?
Source: http://elearningindustry.com/social-media-in-education-%E2%80%93-the-bright-side
Many instructors are interested in learning how to add social media tools into their curriculum, but they aren’t sure how
Social media sites can be a huge distraction for students who aimlessly click through sites
It can be challenging to find ways to incorporate activities with social media that promote actual learning.
Do students want to keep their Books and Beers separate?
We’re going to spend just a short amount of time explaining the tool and focus more on ways to use them for learning activities. If you want help on the technical aspects, please set up a one-on-one training.
The learning objective is most important. Social media is a tool to help teach a concept so be sure to not lose sight of the learning for the cool factor.
Choose 1 tool to start and make it purposeful.
Do not just use social media for the sake of it!
Facebook is the world's largest social network, with more than 900 million users. People mainly use it to connect with important people in their life.
Facebook is King
Good: students can use it to connect with each other outside of the classroom.
Good: students can create a Facebook Group to form online study groups
Bad: students may want to add you as a “Friend”
Facebook Pros & Cons
Build a Facebook application: Computer science students can learn valuable skills for the future by taking on a project to create an app that can be used on Facebook.
Brainstorm: Ask students to collaborate and brainstorm on your classroom's Facebook page.
News gathering: Your classroom can follow media outlets or public figures relevant to your latest classroom discussions.
Archived videos: Important lectures, slides, and more can be shared and saved on Facebook.
Familiarize yourself with students: In large classes, it can sometimes be hard to remember each and every student. Facebook makes it a little easier to connect faces with names.
Flashcardlet: Using Flashcardlet, you can create your own flash cards that students can study on Facebook.
Ways to Use Facebook
http://www.onlinecollege.org/2012/05/21/100-ways-you-should-be-using-facebook-in-your-classroom-updated/
Source: 100 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook in Your Classroom
Twitter allows you to post your ideas in just 140 characters
Letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and spaces all count as characters on Twitter.
What all of this means is, you have to be concise. You have to know exactly what you want to say, and say it in as few words as possible.
Source: http://www.copyblogger.com/twitter-writing/
Connect students with content experts who have a Twitter profile
Ways to Use Twitter
Create fake pages: Ask students to create fake profiles for historical figures, fictional characters, and more.
Ways to Use Twitter
Allow students to tweet their own notes during lessons and share with their peers
Have students follow you and ask them to tweet you about their learning process – including difficulties they face or resources they want to share
Ways to Use Twitter
Source: http://www.teachhub.com/50-ways-use-twitter-classroom
Virtual guest speakers – start a lesson with a video that grabs students’ attention. YouTube can be great for brining in different perspectives. Audio visual is higher up on Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Ways to use YouTube
Have students create a narrated presentation and upload it to YouTube
Record your lectures and post them on YouTube for students to view – students can rewatch!
Create an introduction video Create a playlist of video related to a concept – this
saves students from wasting their time searching for useless or unsuitable information. Check YouTube.com/Teachers for examples
Video Everywhere
Ways to use YouTube
www.ted.com/talks1500+ talks to stir your curiosity
Over 4300 videos Our library of videos covers K-12 math, science topics such
as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer.
"I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him."—Sal
www.khanacademy.org
WHAT IS IT? LinkedIn helps people with employment via online
networking – like an online resume Allows you to maintain a ‘work life’ profileWAYS TO USE IT Join a Group for join discussions and view job
postings Help them establish an online body of work.
Recommendations from colleagues or instructors
Social bookmarking – extends learning outside of the classroom even after a course ends
Social bookmarking site
A great example is Scott Shaw’s - https://delicious.com/thirdrowllc
Delicious
Source: http://www.edudemic.com/2012/12/a-straightforward-guide-to-using-pinterest-in-education/
How to Use Pinterest
Many faculty find lesson plan ideas for their classrooms.
Ways to Use Pinterest
SlideShare is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service. SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews
SlideShare was recently voted amongst the World's Top 10 tools for education & elearning.
There’s a lot of professional content on ShareShare
SlideShare
Tumblr, Wordpress, or Blogger are popular options
Similar to LinkedIn, students or faculty can use these blogging sites to create their online brand.
Blogging is a mechanism for students to show off their creative writing skills.
An easy way to get a student into blogging it to suggest that they copy the text from their discussion board posts into their blog.
Blogging
Bb is about to roll out their internal social media so this may reduce the need to go to other sites.
Students desire to keep their academic network separate from their personal social network, although they do want an online forum to connect with colleagues...in other words:
My Blackboard Profile
Share notes This helps make students feel part of a
community with increases engagement Chat about setting up study groups Offer support
How can students use My Bb?
Decide to learn 1 of these social media tools. Be sure to make it purposeful so that it
meets a learning objective. Contact [email protected] to set up
a one-on-one appointment to learn how to use a tool.
Where do I go from here?