- What new learning outcomes could the use of social media help develop?
Social media in my experience, has been met with especially strong resistance by the school community. Social media tools are seemingly much more difficult to monitor and control than other types of technology such as internet searching. In order to maximize the benefits such as access to a globalized community (November & Mull, 2012), school boards will need to permit the usage of these technologies more quickly. Digital citizenship becomes highly important to ensure our students are communicating in appropriate ways and know how to handle a situation where other users may not be behaving appropriately.
That being said many new outcomes could be supported by the social media tools. Collaboration, critical thinking and creativity in general can be supported. The example in the November article of a teaching posing real world problems as she sees them in her day-to-day life and students responding in their out of school time (November & Mull, 2012) is essentially just-in-time homework. Data collection (Bates, 2014) is one area I had not previously considered. Using hashtags to group and sort information could be used in social studies, math and potentially science class. Group work linked in this same sorting style and viewed by all other students or perhaps the world, provides not only authentic reasons for completing the work, but also flexibility to group and regroup, and share information beyond your own group. Blogs can be used not only to document the learning items but also as a portfolio of the journey of learning. This type of platform can requires minimal technical knowledge but has the multimedia flexibility to afford many options for the student to express themselves.
- Would it be better just to add social media to the course or to re-design it around social media?
While social media is a powerful communication and learning tool, I am not a supporter of building new courses to leverage the benefits. Like all technologies, social media tools are exactly that, tools. Re-designing course elements to take advantages of new ways of learning and demonstration of knowledge extends the strong learning avenues already established. Increasing collaboration and extending learning beyond the classroom, are two very beneficial elements to add to a course. Some social media supports asynchronous while others support synchronous communication. Both can be leveraged within a course to provide communication options that were not possible prior.
- Bates, T. (2014). Pedagogical differences between media: Social media. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-5-5-social-media/ (Chapter 7, point 6)
- November, A. (2012). How Twitter can be used as a powerful educational tool. November Learning [Weblog] Retrieved from http://novemberlearning.com/educational-resources-for-educators/teaching-and-learning-articles/how-twitter-can-be-used-as-a-powerful-educational-tool/