With the growing popularity of social media in all aspects of life, it is surprising how social media platforms are not being used to enhance students’ learning experience.
Do you think social media is considered teacher professional development?
Simultaneously, using online social media websites needs to be done with caution, meaning safely.
Twitter is one of the fastest ways to give out and follow information, while blogs can be a useful tool to encourage and enhance journal writing and creative writing skills among students.
Social media platforms like Cramster are much more like question and answer forum boards, bringing students together from different schools to complete homework assignments or conduct research for a class project. Dropbox provides students and teachers an excellent venue where they can share files for quick and easy access.
With all of these benefits, the answer to the question of whether social media should be considered a teacher-related professional development venue is “yes.”
Popular and mainstream social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook can effectively create and facilitate class-related discussions making the internet seem like an online classroom where everyone can participate without feeling awkward or nervous.
Teachers can easily pullout related news information from online sources and share it with their students interested in an online discussion.
Teachers can even organize class reviews on ongoing writing projects. Students can easily find experts on a particular subject they can follow online to obtain more information vital to their research topic.
The possibilities for using social media platforms as an extension of the classroom are quite endless. With the explosion of social media platforms on the internet, there is a good chance of finding one that everyone will be interested in using.
As most students today are already participating in various social media sites, it only makes sense to be integrated into classroom learning to provide further creative innovations in the education sector.
And while some universities and colleges are starting to adopt this system, not all learning institutions deem it a proper way to connect education to mainstream social media like Twitter or Facebook.
They miss out on the opportunity for students to have convenient access to information that doesn’t limit them to the classroom’s four walls. With the ever-increasing popularity of social media platforms, it will become a popular venue to extend learning outside of the classroom.
