Schools and teachers shouldn’t be fighting social media. They should embrace it. Here are six ways schools and teachers can use facebook, myspace and twitter for education instead of filtering social media, forums and message boards.
Build a Powerful Network
A teacher with 10 years of experience could have had contact with anywhere between 250 to 2000 students. If you include parents that number gets even bigger. Keeping in touch with as many of them as you can through social media can help you build a powerful network that can be exploited to benefit your classes.
Many of your students will go on to do interesting things or be involved in interesting professions. That can be a valuable resource for arranging guest speakers, mentorships, internships and field trips.
Not only that but you can benefit from their own networks. If the six degrees of separation rule is valid and you play your cards right, then you can potentially contact anyone on earth for the benefit of your class. Let that sink in for a moment: anyone!
Share Your Experiences
As an added incentive to having an interesting class, publicly sharing your classes accomplishments and experiences is great for building a following and expanding your influence and possibilities even more. Just make sure you are running an interesting class.
Social media tools like facebook, youtube, myspace, twitter and flickr can help you better connect with parents, the local community, potential volunteers and supporters. Telling people about how amazing your accomplishments are is not as good as showing them.
Be interesting and show it off.
Fundraising
Very little in life is free. Amazing, awesome and interesting is going to need a budget and if your school won’t pony up the cash then your class needs to make things happen for itself. Setup a class website or blog, make a video and link to your social media networks. If you are compelling enough, you will attract an audience that will probably want to see how far the awesome goes enough to contribute. With things like the embeddable chipin widget or even a simple paypal account collecting money on the web is easy. Just be sure to be as transparent as possible when money is involved.
Don’t underestimate the power and reach of the internet. You are only limited by your imagination.
Connect with Other Classes
Thanks to tubes of the internet, you can follow and collaborate with other classes anywhere in the world! Are you studying China? Well connect with a class of Chinese students, I am sure they would be as interested in you as you are in them. You can even talk to them face to face via an inexpensive webcam and a skype account. Why do you need a textbook when you have millions of Chinese on the internet a few keystrokes away?
Why look at a pictures in a book of how Chinese live when you can get students to share pictures of their own homes and stories of how they live? And the best part is, they also get to practice their English. Since they are learning it anyway, not even language is a barrier!
Get Free Expert Consulting
If you need help setting up a particularly interesting but delicate project then network with experts on social media networks to give your class free advice.
Have a puppy dog face contest in your class and then ask the winner to contact some experts. They may be able to say no to you but not some student with a good puppy dog face.
The best part is, with your network, the consultant gets some good publicity and your class gets quality advice. It’s another win-win!
World Wide Class Projects
The web is world wide so take advantage of it.
You can conduct some big projects using the internet. You can have your students split into groups and do some activist work, have a competition to see who can raise the most money for a cause. Students can campaign for politicians they like or depending on your class, they can run for office themselves. (Inspiration: check out this 18 year old on the board of education and this fellow who raised nearly $110,000 from 5700 online donors to campaign for a seat in congress.)
If you are feeling really brave you can raise awareness about an issue your school is struggling with, like outdated textbooks, crumbling facilities or the like and put heavy pressure on local politicians to take immediate action.
Other Benefits
Students use social media no matter what kind of filters or blocks there are. In many of the schools I have worked at, especially high schools, most students access their myspace accounts using proxies anyway. You can’t really stop them.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
If you direct students to use their social media accounts for the greater good, they are going to have to purge them of some inappropriate and unprofessional material. Instead of distractions, their accounts will become important resources they use to represent themselves to important people for important things.
Basically instead of forbidding their social media outlets, you can hijack them for the greater good.
Do you have any ideas on how to use social media for education? Share in the comments.
This is a great article. I totally agree with what you say re: teachers should embrace this new technology. Most schools in the UK block these type of websites which means that the children miss out on lots of opportunities.
My site KidsStoriesOnline.com allows people to post their own stories, poems and artwork online for others to read and comment on. Sadly, because my site is classified as social media it automatically gets blocked by most schools.
I totally agree with teaching children about e-safety but banning them completely whilst at school is a little pointless since as soon as they get home, in many cases, they are then free to roam the internet!
Thanks! It’s a shame your site is blocked especially because of it’s educational focus. I find that schools are usually a few years behind in technology generally. Perhaps as much as a decade in some places I’ve seen (think Windows 98.)
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