This blog gives educators tips and tricks to make the greatest impact while using social media. It is full of helpful information on how to increase students engagement and improve education. If you are like me and would love a great resource for managing all your social media accounts, then you will love using Connected Educator. __ Quiz yourself: Are these features or benefits?
Explore how social media has become an important communication and teaching tool in education. Social Media for Educators (PDF) provides an overview of what educators should know about social media and how they can use it to promote learning. It also provides a list of tools to help teachers find relevant articles, explore topics, and share information with others in a safe environment.
The Connected Educator
A great site for connecting with other educators is edConnectr. It gives educators several avenues with which to find other like-minded educators. A Visual Mapping Engine narrows down certain criteria allowing educators to save valuable time and energy.
Edmodo
Edmodo acts as a playground for teaching and learning with a place for posts, calendars, and general communication for teachers and students. Linking to students becomes simpler and more efficient as well as more effective when students enjoy the presentation of it. It makes it easy to share valuable apps with students.
TedEd
TedEd offers a variation of TED Talks with shorter, often-animated clips of subjects such as science, technology, social studies, literature, language, art, health, psychology, and business and economics. With communities and clubs, the site also makes it effortless for collaboration.
Google+
Besides great graphics and themes, Google+ takes teachers to their students with circles that make managing virtual communication an art. Students might need to know more about a particular lesson because they didn’t quite get it the first time. Pull them into a circle of their own with just the right tools to connect them to their path to understanding and learning.
The great part about Facebook is that everyone is on it. Students love connecting with their friends and family with Facebook so telling them to check out the page where you post only makes sense. However, it’s very important to stay professional and have a separate personal account.
Use a Facebook Page to broadcast updates and alerts.
Facebook can be the perfect social media platform to incorporate into the classroom. Instead of putting instructors and students alike through a new learning curve when dealing with a traditional online classroom dashboard, stick to something everyone already knows.
Have students follow the class’s Facebook Page, and the instructor can use it to post class updates, share homework assignments and encourage discussion.
Even if a student isn’t active on Facebook, these Pages are still accessible when signed out. However, keep in mind Facebook Page are public and anyone with a Facebook account can comment on the posts.
Use a Facebook Group to stream live lectures and host discussions.
Instructors can also create Facebook Groups for each of their classes—both public or private—and stream Facebook Live lectures, post discussion questions, assign homework and make class announcements. Keep students engaged during school breaks or snow days by posting reminders and assignment to avoid having to review once class resumes from the break.
When using social media for education, it’s important to ensure a professional boundary, so when setting up a Facebook Group, teachers do not need to send friend requests. Email both parents and students a direct link to the Facebook Group for access.
Groups are the perfect “home base,” especially for an online course and can make it easy to connect with student.
Use Instagram for photo essays.
In a visual heavy class, students can use Instagram to present a series of photos or graphics in a visually appealing manner. Instagram allows students to practice digital storytelling in ways that other social media platforms may fall short.
Students can create class-specific Instagram accounts and may delete them after the course is over if they so choose.
Create a class blog for discussions.
Writing blog posts gives students another outlet for digital content that they can then easily link back to class social channels. There are many different platforms available, such as WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix, Blogger, Tumblr or Medium, where teachers can create a class blog. Students can create their own user accounts to make discussion posts or add comments on class prompts.
The course syllabus and any assignments, updates and resources can be shared on a blog as a central location as well.
VoiceThread
VoiceThread lets people upload and share images, videos and documents and then have an online conversation about each other’s posts through audio, video or text comments. Alexandra Pickett, director of the Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence and an adjunct instructor at SUNY Albany, started using VoiceThread in 2006, primarily as an icebreaking activity in her online course. She introduces herself to her students through an informal video of herself at home with her daughter, so her students can get a full picture of who she is, professionally and personally. “One of the things that you want to do initially in an online course is to establish a sense of social presence among the participants in the course and with the students,” said Pickett. “And so I want to represent myself as a real person because that way they know that I’m real; I’m not a robot, I’m approachable, I am multidimensional.” She then invites her students to start a conversation about the importance of social presence in an online course.
Pickett likes the ability to have a conversation in multiple media. “It gives students a lot of options and flexibility in how to present themselves and in how to interact with a learning activity set up by the instructor or a presentation that they might be doing, so there are a lot of ways to use this tool instructionally,” she said.
Pickett said her students usually start out using VoiceThread’s text tool. To encourage them to branch out to audio and video, she models all of the different methods of interaction, and she makes it a “very low barrier in terms of expectations.” Some students are initially very formal and scripted in their posts and responses, so she also encourages them to relax and be more conversational. She models that conversational style in her own posts, but experience has taught her that she also needs to explicitly state her expectations for a casual, conversational tone.
According to Pickett, VoiceThread is easy to use and its functionality is intuitive. “It allows you to make the material that you’re talking about more engaging visually as well as in terms of interaction. It’s less passive than just reading text.”
Conclusion
Did you know there are thousands of social media tools available to help educators engage their students and boost learning? From podcasts, podcasts and videos to chats, boards, blogs and wikis, these resources can help you reach your students in a new way.