Reflection 6: Social Media

Our school used Blogger for two years. Every classroom had a blog and we were expected to do a minimum of 2-3 posts each week. This was implemented so our staff could engage with classrooms overseas and our learners would have a context for learning outside our own school context. Towards the end of last year, questions started to arose around what is the actual benefit of a blog, who is benefitting and what are the learners achieving from this? We could see the impact blogs had upon the senior students as each one of them had their own personal blog and they did understand a few of the benefits and purposes of having one, as they could engage with people within their own guided terms and be in control of their own blog.

However, for our junior classrooms, we soon began to realise that these reasons were inapplicable to us. Our blogs were not meaningful nor relevant for our learners so because of this, we changed to Seesaw. Half of our parents weren’t checking the classroom blogs nor were majority of them interested in seeing posts of other children. At the end of the day, the parents were interested in seeing their own child’s learning. Seesaw provides an opportunity for that to occur. The biggest factor is that it is a platform that is solely centered around their child and it is something that can follow them right throughout the whole primary education. Blogger does that and it can work for seniors, but it is not relevant for our junior learners.

I do believe that we need to emphasise enough the impact of how negative abuse of social media tools can have upon our learners. Privacy settings on different platforms are constantly changing. Our learners are entering a digital centered future, but is our curriculum, teaching, and learning doing enough to teach our learners of the negative factors that social media can have upon us, as well?

I am part of a young generation where Social Media has completely altered so many different walks of life. Social media has not only changed many people’s personal life but working environments, as well. We can quickly understand the pedagogies around why social media is useful. If used appropriately, social media provides a context for our learners to engage and collaborate with people and communities outside the ‘four walls’ of our classroom, no matter what tool it is. When you think about, all common social media tools that we are using today connect people between different towns and countries. Social media opens up incredible opportunities for our learners to connect with different topics, issues, communities, and people that our learners would never had known, if it weren’t for some of these tools. As Melhuish (2013) said, social networking sites provide a chance for ‘geographically-separated’ people to connect and learn from individuals who were ‘previously inaccessible’.

A social media platform like Google+ has been a pure and authentic opportunity for me to apply the true pedagogies behind good social media usage. I have been able to collaborate and engage with many individuals who I would previously not even known or engaged with. This platform has provided each one of us, myself included, with a purpose and drive for learning. Because this is a shared network, we are motivated and challenged by those around us because we are constantly engaging with different ideas and thoughts that allow us to question ourselves as educators. Through social media, and an effective tool like Seesaw and Google+, every individual is provided with an opportunity to have a voice.

References:

Melhuish, K.(2013). Online social networking and its impact on New Zealand educators’ professional learning. Master Thesis. The University of Waikato. Retrieved on 05 May, 2015 from http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/han…


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