Social Media in Classrooms

After reading the articles, I’m still pretty ambivalent about using social media as a teacher. At once, I see its benefit as an educator to share links, thoughts, lesson plans, tips for classroom management, etc with colleagues. Yet, I don’t see much utility in using it in the classroom with students. I agree with the article that pointed out that this would be very helpful for younger teachers who have less experience lesson planning and managing their classroom, and thus would find immense value in mining their peers for advice. I love the idea that one teacher can find a video useful for teaching students about a battle in the civil war, for example, and simply tweet a link. The sharing amongst my Personal Learning Network is exciting and it makes me want to be active in my community. I love the sense of teamwork I get from observing the way other teachers interact. However, I think that Twitter does not provide enough space for substance for it to beneficial for students. Twitter encourages short bytes of 140 characters or less, which is not nearly enough for a student to flesh out a complete thought. I would rather see at least a paragraph from the student explaining how he got to where he is in his thought process. For these reasons, I would prefer to have students use blogging for social media. This allows students to write longer texts in both the post and the subsequents comments. I would also shy away from facebook because it tends to be an outlet for personal social media sharing as well. This issue would also be eliminated by a classroom blog. For me, I would have students make posts and others comment on them, much the way we do in this class to allow students to write at length about topics, rather than quick thoughts.