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Social Media in the Classroom: the Opportunities and the Risks

Michael Nutter

May 24, 2017

Social media has been observed to have positive effects on student engagement, but many K-12 educators remain wary of bringing it into their classrooms. By following best practices, teachers can reap the benefits of this social phenomenon while avoiding the risks.

For some time now, educators have been aware of the positive effects that digital technology can have on student engagement. Yet in spite of our growing familiarity with mobile tech and specifically social media, K-12 teachers have been very slow in bringing these findings to bear on their actual curriculum. Richard Chang points out in a post for education tech blog The Journal that “teacher use of social platforms in the classroom has decreased since late 2013.”

So why has this supposedly ascendent phenomenon actually trended downwards in the past few years? There are a number of legitimate concerns held by teachers and administrators about social media in the classroom, chief among them being cyberbullying, inappropriate online content, and distraction from the learning environment. But there’s another, more easily addressed problem at the root of this trend: lack of awareness on the part of educators as to how today’s social media platforms work, and therefore, how they can be put to use in an educational setting.

To address these misunderstandings, educators would do well to examine some of the functionalities of today’s most popular social media platforms and consider how they might be used to further immerse K-12 students in the learning experience.

The Opportunities

As educators well know, virtually any lesson plan can be made more memorable and more engaging by adding a video component. Social media platforms serve as great resources for supplementary educational content, whether they’re short, creative reminders of due dates and upcoming exams, or longer video lessons that cover a given subject matter extensively.

Snapchat’s “My Story” functionality lets you upload videos of up to ten seconds in length for quick reminders or even short lessons. For example, you might reinforce a vocabulary term with a quick and clever visual pun. Instagram videos offer your curriculum a little more breathing room, with a maximum video length of one minute. You can use both these apps to document field trips or, if you’re teaching an art class, showcase the work of your students (Instagram may be the better choice for this option, given that Snapchat My Story posts disappear within 24 hours).

Another huge advantage of social media is group messaging — the ability to set up lines of communication exclusively between student groups. Facebook groups provide you and your students with a dedicated space to share educational content and hold class discussions, placing virtually zero limits on the size of the content — text, video, or otherwise — you can post. Group message threads on apps like WhatsApp, Kik, and even Twitter are also excellent places to facilitate group discussion both in and out of the classroom.

The Risks

One of the more significant and obvious risks of social media is that students will find themselves distracted by the platforms that are supposed to be engaging them in their studies. While classroom supervision should always play a part in deterring this, it’s true that there will inevitably be some temptation to use sites like Facebook and Twitter for recreational purposes during class time. If you’ve got too many students in your class to effectively monitor their time use, it may be better to use more stripped-down platforms like WhatsApp.

Digital threats pose another problem, regardless of whether they come in the form of malicious attacks, like phishing scams, or through explicit, inappropriate content online. Part of this problem can be solved through the use of web filters that block access to problematic sites. But in the end, online safety is something students will have to learn, and you should take it upon yourself to help educate students as to what constitutes a digital threat, how to spot them, and how to adjust their social media privacy settings.

Now that you have the full context for how useful social media can be in the classroom and how to limit the risks associated with it, you might consider it worth testing with your students. After all, another major advantage of social media is that it’s infinitely malleable, and you can change or delete your approach depending on how students respond. When you’ve got an opportunity to more fully engage students, why not try to make the most of it?

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