Using Social Media in Education is no longer just a nice to have skill, it has become what students expect. Students expect their schools whether it’s K-12 or higher education to have a prescience on Social media. As social media as grown in popularity over the past few years more and more, people spend a lot of time on Social Media websites. Many people check their Facebook accounts multiple times a day. Many young people use YouTube as their primary means of entertainment.
Education has always been very slow to accept new ways of doing things and it is always been okay, but that stance is not going to work much longer. We live in an age when people all over the world communicate ideas at the speed of light. Many of the young people of today understand more about their world than any generation before them. If Educators are going to compete with all the noise on the internet, then the must embrace and even learn to dominate social media platforms.
Many educators are starting to wake up to the power these networks offer, but many still think delivering a lecture on a whiteboard or worse blackboard is all that is needed to provide effective instruction to the world’s youth. That is just not true any longer. Students are so bombarded every day with so much information, the important lessons and knowledge they should be getting in school are being replaced with funny YouTube clips or endless updates from Facebook Fan pages. Educators need to start putting better content in front of these students to ensure their education is also a portion of that noise.
Academic’s need to start producing quality content that is interesting enough that it starts to become viral and people are exposed to better information. Social media is only a tool it is up to educated individuals to start finding effective ways to reach this population.
Not only is it the duty of educators it also makes our jobs a lot easier as we can start to re-purpose content for a multitude of purposes. This allows you to increase your reach without really doing a lot more work. You can use these strategies to realize the advantages of social media in education.
Here are some Social Media for Educators Resources you can use to help bridge this growing gap.
Social Media for Educators:
TeachAde – A social network for teachers
An introduction to Social Media in Education