I am a frequent user of social media… potentially an addict if I’m honest. I am not a prolific poster but I am a prolific reader/lurker. I check on Facebook numerous times a day. I am a follower on Twitter (rarely a poster) appreciating the posts of educators such as Alice Keeler @alicekeeler and organisations like Edutopia @edutopia. I follow many on Instagram and have recently started using Snapchat. When I look at it, I am a follower not an initiator. A lot of my social media use is to keep myself informed of current practices and trends, to seek advice and search for resources. Being able to connect easily with fellow educators from around the world is a valuable tool (Melhuish, 2013).
In my classroom I use Blogger to operate a class blog which highlights what the students have been doing in class. I often wonder about the value of this as it has not received any comments this year from friends and whanau of my students. Is there a better forum I could be using to include parents and caregivers in our everyday classroom life? We have recently implemented Class Dojo as a behaviour management tool. The platform does have functions for including parent input and the ability for students to actively participate so my holiday task is to investigate this further. Some classes (Yr 7&8) at our school use Facebook but because of the age restrictions on Facebook the teacher does all the posting. I struggle to see the appropriateness of this as is it not promoting underage use of Facebook? The teacher justifies it, saying he is posting not the students. The jury is out for me on this one.
Last year my class of Year 3s and 4s took part in a number of Chapter Chats which is effectively a book club where participating classes join together at a designated time to interact using Twitter, discussing the chapter read that week. My students enjoyed this but it took quite a bit of coaching about using Twitter, focusing on writing quality tweets that answered the questions posted. One of the challenges of this particular social media interaction was the pressure it put on students who struggle with writing and reading. They needed considerable support to interact and dealing with that together with the pressure of 28 students all tweeting simultaneously was a serious test of my wits.
I have often considered using social media to connect with other classrooms around the world… I think this would be an amazing experience for the students. They are quite sheltered when it comes to seeing that the world is a big place and I don’t think that they realise how different learning is in other parts of the world. Maybe another research task for the upcoming holidays...
References
Melhuish, K.(2013). Online social networking and its impact on New Zealand educators’ professional learning. Master Thesis. The University of Waikato. Retrieved from http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/han…
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