Using Social Media in Education Part 3

You can read Part 1 of the series here and Part 2 here.

What do you have in your teaching toolchest?

In the first post in this series, we discussed using B-learning as a strategy for organizing resources based on their particular strengths and weaknesses. For example, when viewed as a resource, teachers work very well with small groups and for providing meaningful context for content. They are not very good at delivery large quantities of complex information to large groups of students. That’s what a textbook is good at. But a textbook can’t provide feedback to students or provide students with opportunities to apply the skills they are learning. In-class activities and e-learning are good for that particular task. So, depending of the learning objectives you’ve established, if you know what resources are good at what and how to combine them to compensate for any individual weaknesses, then you can create more effective learning channels.

How do I choose the right resource based on objectives?

We will look at social media channels applied to the three categories of learning objectives mentioned earlier: Concepts (why something is important), Content (what information is important) and Skills (how do you apply the concepts and content in a meaningful way). For example, say we’re teaching a math class and the topic is standard deviation. We want to start by giving students an example of how standard deviation is used in the real world; maybe we ask the students the following questions: How much money do you think pizza companies lose each year on deliveries that exceed the 30 minute time limit? How do you think the companies figure this out? How important do you think this information is to the company? Students would begin to understand that knowing how to use standard deviation is important (concept).

Next, we need to teach students the basic mechanics of standard deviation. We write the formula on the board, explain the different components and what the symbols mean and how it relates to previously taught material. Then we do a couple of example questions for the students to show how data is plugged into the formula (modelling). We have now delivered the core content.

Finally, we want to make sure students know how to use the formula themselves. Traditionally, we would give them a written test. But why don’t we make this a little more fun? Let’s give the students some real world problems to solve. We give them a handout with three or four problems, such as:

1. How safe are roller coasters?

2. How often does the school cafeteria offer nutritiously balanced meals?

3. What impact does weather have on your favorite sports team?

4. What is the difference in pricing between men’s and women’s clothing of similar design and function?

We tell the students they need to choose one of the problems and they can work individually or in groups to solve it. They will need to present their findings to the class later. Now we are meeting our skills objectives.

So where does social media fit in with our traditional teaching resources to help us meet these objectives?

Concept Objectives: If we want students to understand why the content and skills we are teaching them are important we need to make both a logical and an emotional appeal, so resources and channels that provide context are best suited to the task: the instructor (with or without the aid of computer presentations) and e-learning are both effective at providing context. Additionally, introductory in-class activities, especially role plays and simulations, can be powerful tools for getting students to understand why a subject is important.

Concerning social media, dedicated Facebook pages or blogs can be extremely useful. Imagine teaching students about Gandhi and having them visit his blog where he describes the events of his day from his perspective. For chemistry, you could set up a series of tweets from an imaginary scientist working in his lab creating a new soft drink. Geography? Showing the students videos from YouTube about the devastating and tragic events in Haiti can serve as a powerful contextual example of the power of our Earth.

Content: The student needs to understand what information is important, and be able to access this information easily. For these objectives, textbooks are the traditional go-to resource, although websites can be equally valuable if the student knows how to use them (more on this in a later post). Depending on the depth of the content, other resources and channels are also suitable: audio CDs, computer presentations, videos and e-learning can all be used if the information is limited, easy to grasp or simply a review or summary of previously learned content.

Using social media to meet content objectives can be as simple as sending students a quick tip via Twitter or as elaborate as creating a series of instructional videos and uploading them to YouTube. It really comes down to choosing the best channel based on the amount of content that needs to be delivered.

Skills: In-class activities are best for giving students the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of how concepts and content should be applied. Activities also provide teachers with the chance to interact with their students on a more personal level, ensuring that authentic learning is taking place, answering questions and identifying and correcting mistakes before formal assessments. Worksheets and e-learning can also provide students with a forum for demonstrating skills, and while they lack the ability to provide the personalized feedback that makes in-class activities so powerful, they can reach a larger number of students simultaneously and be used as a launching pad for further assessment later.

In my opinion, social media can really shine as a tool for meeting these skills based objectives by providing students with opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge and abilities on a broad range of easy-to-use, interactive, free platforms. Imagine having students creating simple television commercials using their cell phone cameras, and uploading them to YouTube where the rest of the class can leave comments. Or having students read a story and then uploading their artistic interpretations of the plot onto a blog for analysis by other students. How about using Google Docs as a collaborative platform and having the students create their own novel, each student contributing a chapter? All of this is easy to set up and free!

In my next post I will introduce a sample school project that will hopefully show how social media channels and traditional classroom resources can be integrated to create a more dynamic and interactive learning environment.

Which learning objectives do you feel social media can help us solve? Do you think social media can have a negative impact on the learning environment?

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