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Is Social Media Relevant? Take the Quiz
Before we talk social media, let's talk about the relevance of social media by taking a quiz. Which of the following is most likely to be true?
The Social Media Answer
One form of writing is that powerful.
If you guessed social media, you're right.
The Social Media Myth
The myth about social media in the classroom is that if you use it, kids will be Tweeting, Facebooking and Snapchatting while you're trying to teach. We still have to focus on the task at hand. Don't mistake social media for socializing. They're different -- just as kids talking as they work in groups or talking while hanging out are different.
You don't even have to bring the most popular social media sites into your classroom. You can use Fakebook or FakeTweet as students work on this form of conversation. Edublogs, Kidblog, Edmodo, and more will let you use social media competencies and writing techniques. Some teachers are even doing "tweets" on post-it notes as exit tickets. You can use mainstream social media, too.
12 Ways Teachers are Using Social Media in the Classroom Right Now
- Tweet or post status updates as a class. Teacher Karen Lirenmanlets students propose nuggets of learning that are posted for parents to read.
- Write blog posts about what students are learning. Teacher Kevin Jarrett blogs reflections about his Elementary STEM lab for parents to read each week.
- Let your students write for the world. Linda Yollis' students reflect about learning and classroom happenings.
- Connect to other classrooms through social media. Joli Barker is fearlessly connecting her classroom through a variety of media.
- Use Facebook to get feedback for your students' online science fair projects. Teacher Jamie Ewing is doing this now, as he shared recently.
- Use YouTube for your students to host a show or a podcast. Don Wettrick's students hosted the Focus Show online and now share their work on a podcast.
- Create Twitter accounts for a special interest projects. My student Morgan spent two years testing and researching the best apps for kids with autism (with the help of three "recruits"), and her work just won her an NCWIT Award for the State of Georgia.
- Ask questions to engage your students in authentic learning. Tom Barrett did this when his class studied probability by asking about the weather in various locations.
- Communicate with other classrooms. The Global Read Aloud, Global Classroom Project and Physics of the Future are three examples of how teachers use social media to connect their students as they collaborate and communicate.
- Create projects with other teachers. (Full disclosure: I co-created Physics of the Future with Aaron Maurer, a fellow educator I first met on Twitter.)
- Share your learning with the world. My students are creating an Encyclopedia of Learning Games with Dr. Lee Graham's grad students at the University of Alaska Southeast. The educators are testing the games, and the students are testing them, too.
- Further a cause that you care about. Mrs. Stadler's classes are working to save the rhinos in South Africa, and Angela Maiers has thousands of kids choosing to matter.
It's in the Standards
If you're going to ignore social media in the classroom, then throw out the ISTE Standards for Students and stop pretending that you're 21st century. Stop pretending that you're helping low-income children overcome the digital divide if you aren't going to teach them how to communicate online.
Social media is here. It's just another resource and doesn't have to be a distraction from learning objectives. Social media is another tool that you can use to make your classroom more engaging, relevant and culturally diverse.
In Voice Recorder (when you open your file), you can click the share button in the top right corner, then click ‘Share’.
To submit on Google Classroom, they open the assignment by clicking on ‘open’.
Once open, you can still switch between how you want to add the file. In Drive, you will notice that you can search through your files by the name of them to quickly locate what you want to attach to the assignment. When you have found the file you want to add (An audio file in our case), click on it so the ‘Add’ button becomes a darker blue and you can click on it. Once you do so, it attaches into the assignment like the last image. Now the ‘turn in’ button is a darker blue and can be clicked. Once clicked, and confirmed, the red Not Done will turn to a Green Done. And Voila, the student is finished their work and you receive the audio file in your google drive folder. Hope this helps!
