social media – Reflections and e-Portfolio ETEC565

5 key Strategies to engaging students using social media

#	Theme	Strategy
1.	Teach Responsibility	Instead of banning devices, leverage an authoritarian style to teach digital responsibility and appropriate use of technology.
2.	Participation	Focus on creating a learner centered environment in which each student has a voice. Make personal contact with each student and encourage participation. Allow students to realize they are not just consumers of information, they are a part of creating it.
3.	Expand Learning	Provide opportunities for students to meet and become experts in their area of study to encourage authentic learning and extend learning beyond classroom walls. Use social media to foster innovation.
4.	Collaboration	Encourage collaboration by providing opportunities for students to work together to arrive at solutions to open ended questions.
5.	Lifelong Learning	Extend learning beyond school hours by inviting students to plan and organize synchronous meeting times for information sharing, problem solving, and progressing with project completion.

5 key Challenges to engaging students using social media

#	Theme	Challenge
1.	Privacy	There are risks of privacy violations.
2.	Preexisting Culture	Teachers need to learn how to step back and allow the social media to be learning driven.
3.	New Methods of Old Behaviors	Social media can be used to facilitate undesirable behaviors such as cyber-bullying and personal attacks.
4.	Distraction	Students may be distracted by affordances of technology which may detract from the learning objective and disrupt the class.
5.	Equitable Access	Access to the tools and training required for participation in technology related activities may be inequitable.

In my classroom, the most impactful ‘sighting’ of Social media is in the form of Wikipedia. This resource is constantly referenced to fact check, by both myself and my students, to inquire into topics that are beyond the textbook or collective knowledge of the classroom. Although as a class we do not often contribute to the actual wikipedia pages, there is a general understanding that these projects are collaborative and have been created by a wide collection of people around the world. I feel this helps give credibility to the concept of constructivism and the understanding that knowledge is created through the efforts of many.

Opportunities
– Individuals can contribute to the collective knowledge

Challenges
– There can be a hesitation to use social media due to the persistent idea that it lacks credibility due to its collectivist roots.