Social Media in Education
This workshop will introduce how to incorporate social media tools
into learning activities. When used properly, social media tools can
boost student engagement, link students to content experts, find
online classroom lessons, and help them establish an online body of
work/establish their brand.
WHY IS SOCIAL LEARNING
IMPORTANT?
 90% of college students visit social networking sites on
a regular basis
 Social learning is learners learning from each other
 Today's students want to document their feelings and
insights in a highly timely manner
 Social learning can increase comprehension of
material and create new channels for students to
learn.
Source: http://elearningindustry.com/social-media-in-education-%E2%80%93-the-bright-side
Do students want to keep their
Books and Beers separate?
 Many instructors are interested in learning how to
add social media tools into their curriculum, but they
aren’t sure how
 Social media sites can be a huge distraction for
students who aimlessly click through sites
 It can be challenging to find ways to incorporate
activities with social media that promote actual
learning.
Do not just use social media
for the sake of it!
 We’re going to spend just a short amount of time
explaining the tool and focus more on ways to use
them for learning activities. If you want help on the
technical aspects, please set up a one-on-one training.
 The learning objective is most important. Social
media is a tool to help teach a concept so be sure to
not lose sight of the learning for the cool factor.
 Choose 1 tool to start and make it purposeful.
Facebook is King
 Facebook is the world's
largest social network,
with more than 900
million users. People
mainly use it to connect
with important people in
their life.
Facebook Pros & Cons
 Good: students can use it to connect with each other
outside of the classroom.
 Good: students can create a Facebook Group to form
online study groups
 Bad: students may want to add you as a “Friend”
Ways to Use Facebook
 Build a Facebook application: Computer science students can learn valuable skills for
the future by taking on a project to create an app that can be used on Facebook.
 Brainstorm: Ask students to collaborate and brainstorm on your classroom's Facebook
page.
 News gathering: Your classroom can follow media outlets or public figures relevant to
your latest classroom discussions.
 Archived videos: Important lectures, slides, and more can be shared and saved on
Facebook.
 Familiarize yourself with students: In large classes, it can sometimes be hard to
remember each and every student. Facebook makes it a little easier to connect faces
with names.
 Flashcardlet: Using Flashcardlet, you can create your own flash cards that students can
study on Facebook.
Source: 100 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook in Your Classroom
http://www.onlinecollege.org/2012/05/21/100-ways-you-should-be-usingfacebook-in-your-classroom-updated/
Twitter
 Twitter allows you to post your ideas in just 140
characters
 Letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and spaces all
count as characters on Twitter.
 What all of this means is, you have to be concise. You
have to know exactly what you want to say, and say it
in as few words as possible.
Source: http://www.copyblogger.com/twitter-writing/
Ways to Use Twitter
 Connect students with content experts who have a Twitter
profile
Ways to Use Twitter
 Create fake pages:
Ask students to
create fake profiles
for historical figures,
fictional characters,
and more.
Ways to Use Twitter
 Allow students to tweet their own notes during lessons and
share with their peers
 Have students follow you and ask them to tweet you about
their learning process – including difficulties they face or
resources they want to share
Source: http://www.teachhub.com/50-ways-use-twitter-classroom
Ways to use YouTube
 Virtual guest speakers – start a lesson with a video that
grabs students’ attention. YouTube can be great for brining
in different perspectives. Audio visual is higher up on
Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Ways to use YouTube
 Have students create a narrated presentation and upload it
to YouTube
 Record your lectures and post them on YouTube for
students to view – students can rewatch!
 Create an introduction video
 Create a playlist of video related to a concept – this saves
students from wasting their time searching for useless or
unsuitable information. Check YouTube.com/Teachers for
examples
 Video Everywhere
www.ted.com/talks
1500+ talks to stir your curiosity
www.khanacademy.org
 Over 4300 videos
 Our library of videos covers K-12 math, science topics such
as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into
the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each
video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long,
and especially purposed for viewing on the computer.
"I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are
coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by
the world around him."
—Sal
LinkedIn
WHAT IS IT?
 LinkedIn helps people with employment via online networking
– like an online resume
 Allows you to maintain a ‘work life’ profile
WAYS TO USE IT
 Join a Group for join discussions and view job postings
 Help them establish an online body of work.
 Recommendations from colleagues or instructors
Delicious
 Social bookmarking –
extends learning outside
of the classroom even
after a course ends
 Social bookmarking site
 A great example is Scott
Shaw’s https://delicious.com/thirdr
owllc
How to Use Pinterest
Source: http://www.edudemic.com/2012/12/a-straightforward-guide-to-using-pinterest-in-education/
Ways to Use Pinterest
 Many faculty find
lesson plan ideas for
their classrooms.
SlideShare
 SlideShare is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service.
SlideShare is the world's largest community for
sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly
visitors and 130 million pageviews
 SlideShare was recently voted amongst the World's
Top 10 tools for education & elearning.
 There’s a lot of professional content on ShareShare
Blogging
 Tumblr, Wordpress, or Blogger are popular options
 Similar to LinkedIn, students or faculty can use these
blogging sites to create their online brand.
 Blogging is a mechanism for students to show off
their creative writing skills.
 An easy way to get a student into blogging it to
suggest that they copy the text from their discussion
board posts into their blog.
My Blackboard Profile
 Bb is about to roll out their
internal social media so this may
reduce the need to go to other
sites.
 Students desire to keep their
academic network separate from
their personal social network,
although they do want an online
forum to connect with
colleagues...in other words:
How can students use My Bb?
 Share notes
 This helps make students feel part of a community
with increases engagement
 Chat about setting up study groups
 Offer support
Where do I go from here?
 Decide to learn 1 of these social media tools.
 Be sure to make it purposeful so that it meets a
learning objective.
 Contact adam.c.voyton@wilmu.edu to set up a oneon-one appointment to learn how to use a tool.