Using social media in the classroom is for many is a new frontier for learning. For most teachers the learning takes place in the classroom, and occasionally with homework, at home. However, if you think about the spaces the learners inhabit regularly, the classroom and home fall into third place compared to the virtual spaces online.
Many of these spaces are the ones occupied by social media. This comes in several forms, and for most teachers the training provided is out of date. Does your school ban Facebook? That may be the case... but in honesty most of the pupils we teach have long since migrated to other forms of social media not inhabited by their parents. Buckle up - there are myriad types of social media that teachers need to understand. Every teacher needs to be a teacher of e-safety – believe it or not, in the new computing curriculum your ICT teachers don’t have a lot of time devoted to this. Using social media responsibly, is the job of every teacher in the school to role model. Alongside this is the challenge of embracing using social media to take the learning to the spaces pupils already inhabit. Ask yourself – are your students more likely to check their email for a assignment notification, or are the more likely to respond to a tweet or Tumblr notification?
Integrating social media into the school
The use of social media in school is two-fold. The first is about creating a climate where children are being taught to use social media safely, and in a way where their teachers can role model it’s effective and positive use. Initially the most important thing is to make sure you have an effective usage policy in place, and that this is widely shared with staff and students. This needs to clearly address the responsibilities that the school has in terms of keeping learners safe, but also stipulates the ways in which learners must conform to rules when using IT in the school environment.
These can be easily adapted to include the use of social media by pupils, and can be signed at the beginning of the year. This might sound insignificant, but when dealing with those who have broken the rules, having the right policies in place will help appropriate sanctions to be applied. When applying sanctions, it must be considered that using technology is nothing particularly new. So, for example, iMessaging in class is the digital equivalent of passing notes. Teachers need to be empowered to tell students when technology should be used, and feel confident in asking them to put it away when they ask. If there is any misbehaviour, the teachers should imply equivalent sanctions to similar fractions of the rules that take place without the use of technology. Some of this will of course take time for teachers to acclimatise too, but some simple behaviour management techniques, such as occasionally teaching from the back of the room, will quickly help you see any students who are off task and using technology. Deal with this on the spot if you can. There should be consequences for breaking the rules in a classroom. Teachers are more than used to dealing with rule-breakers, and just because this involves the use of technology makes it no different. Empower staff to know how to deal with infractions, and have a clear chain of command of how to escalate or query any issues that may occur. In my school we have a detention system, but we have found that a lunchtime session based around e-safety is more productive in terms of the impact it has on students.
Teachers, SLT, Governors and parents need to work together to best equip those in school to deal with social media in a safe way. This should be done through PSHE, but also in tutor group time. Teacher cross-subjects should always work when using social media to ensure that their use is within the lines agreed by the school - this is not a case of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Work with your SLT and teaching staff to ensure that the aims of using social media are transparent, as well as agreed by the school.
For many this can be a big step. Many schools are reluctant to actively use social media. This is a real shame as they are missing out on chances to connect with other schools, parents and the wider world. There is no ignoring the increased use of schools and departments of twitter in this respect, and there are some excellent examples of good practice and the sharing of ideas. The perils lie in having a social media profile on a platform, such as twitter, which is not regularly updated or ignores messages. You need to be certain that anyone running a school or department account updates it regularly, and is aware of basic e-safety, for example of twitter, not following individual students as this is when direct messaging (private messaging) can occur, which could potentially be problematic. The advantages of using social media as a school far outweigh the negatives. For those schools who are tentative, they could try setting up a twitter account that tweets from the RSS feed of the school news website. It is worth having a positive presence online, which will help to reach out, not only to current parents, but also to those considering your school.
Useful examples
Facebook is a social media platform that has been much demonised in the education sector. However, following the work of the Education Foundation, many teachers are now using it to lead lessons, such as setting up private class groups, and public groups which use Facebook as a free VLE as a response to budget cuts. There is no right way. Many working with mature students have found using Facebook particularly effective, but those of us working secondary school age pupils have found that many of our students no longer routinely check it as their parents use it extensively. You need to make a judgement call here. Facebook has excellent privacy settings, and learners can share their work, ideas and comment on articles/others work in a private group however, Facebook prefers teachers to use one account. I have a personal Facebook account full of photographs of my children which I would not want to share with my learners. I have set up a ‘teacher’ account, which I do use. This is a judgement for other professionals to make. My school, like many others, had Facebook banned for a long time - which is done through filtered Wi-Fi. However, we have been trialling its use for school groups such as the public speaking society and digital leaders. Uptake in this respect has not been as high as I might have expected. I think that on the most part the current cohort in secondary schools may well have Facebook accounts, but do not use them as their primary social media outlet.
The second social media platform I would like to consider is Twitter. For teachers there are obvious benefits of using Twitter to connect with other professionals from around the world. I was surprised when I first joined, how freely educators on Twitter shared ideas and resources, and also at how fervent some of the educational discussion could be. My advice for new teacher joining twitter would be to change their avatar away from the ‘twitter egg’ and to make sure that their bio says ‘teacher’ in there somewhere. You are of course very welcome to lurk and simply follow conversations, which you can do by following people. I think that the real benefit to educators comes from becoming engaged with those discussions and reading the numerous education blogs that are shared there. A good place to start would be look at this list of 101 teachers to follow on Twitter, compiled by @teachertoolkit. I would also recommend you follow @Pedagoo, a wonderful organisation which has a blog, where teachers can use. Alongside this @staffrm also gives teachers a free blogging platform. Both have very welcoming communities, and they are keen to embrace teachers who have just started using social media to connect with others. Another must follow for me is @UkEdChat who produce masses of useful information and resources. They also host a webchat on a Thursday, which you can following using #UKEdChat.
For newcomers to Twitter, following a hashtag can be a fantastic way to find others interested in the same topics as you, and a good guide to frequently used hashtags can be found here. Bear in mind that the same rules we teach the children in our classroom apply to adults using social media, so please be polite and respectful when discussing (even the most hotly contested) views with others.
Schools as institutions can also make use of Twitter. There are now many schools that have a whole school Twitter account, and use this to connect with parents and to share good news. This can be excellent marketing for the school, and a Twitter account can be easily run from your school’s news RSS feed so that it is being kept up to date.
More recently there has also been a rise of departmental Twitter use, primarily used to encourage students to interact with useful information. So for example, my school department Maths account, retweets maths exam advice, maths puzzles and other things of interest to maths students. This is another way of reaching the children and engaging with them outside the classroom. I consider this as taking the learning to the children, in a social media space that they already inhabit and are likely to see.
Anecdotal evidence certainly seems to support that children are more likely to engage with resources they can easily access on their phones, on a platform that doesn’t require logging in such as a VLE. I would advise teachers to make use of whatever means they have of potentially having an impact on the learning of the children in our classrooms, and for example, tweeting a morning revision Podcast is more likely to reach an audience than depositing it on a VLE.
Alongside using Twitter to connect with other professionals, and as a whole school, you can also make excellent use of it in the classroom as a learning tool. Remember, children have to be 13 to have a Twitter account and you should not follow them back. I think in this respect, it is a sensible thing to ensure professional separation from your personal Twitter account if you have one. Many teachers have a teacher account which they use to interact with the children in their classrooms. Hands down the best activity I have found for using Twitter in the classroom was to ask the children to live tweet the lesson. That is, they took photographs of the work and tweeted these, alongside any questions or ideas that they had. When they tweet they must also include a unique hashtag (such as #missjonesIT) so that the tweets can be followed using that hashtag. You can then use an app call Spout on an iPad, or tablet, which follows the tweets and curates them into beautiful kinesthetic typography. If you project this onto the whiteboard you can have a stream of tweets and images about the learning inspiring further questioning and ideas as the lesson continues. I have also found that once children start sharing their work, it creates a culture of more reflective learning - they are happy to revise their diagram as they have just seen a tweeted image from another child which gave them additional ideas to add. This is truly wonderful and inspiring collaborative learning.
Some teachers worry that children may tweet inappropriate content, but I have never experienced this, and I think that it is part of building relationships of mutual trust. I would also explain to pupils that sanctions would be applied if they broke this trust. Don’t forget the wider world also uses hashtags on Twitter, and you can use these in lessons to follow inter/national events such as the general election or the recent Curiosity Rover landings. Twitter is a fabulous educational resource, and one which teachers would benefit from embracing.
Schools that use the G Suite for Education (formerly called Google Apps for Education) may also consider using Google+. This is less mainstream as a social media platform in terms of adults and school age children. Users tend to be very devoted to sharing on the G+ platform, and in particular there is a wealth of digital technologies and teaching and learning resources available that would be of interest to teachers. It works via a Gmail account, which you use to login, and then you can put people in ‘circles’ so that their content is displayed on your home page. This is comparable to following someone on Twitter. You can also join special interest groups, whose content will then also populate your homepage. You can post to G+ in a similar way that you can to Twitter. The real bonus for using it in an educational setting is creating a circle for your class. Because the G Suite tools play well together, students are able to share their work done in Docs, Slides or Sheets to G+ and they can they ask for peer feedback. This can certainly work to encourage independent learning, and when I have set up class circles, they have used them exclusively to seek peer feedback before the work was sent to me for teacher feedback.
The magic of providing effective feedback using G Suite products is that you as a teacher can also provide formative feedback as the work is still in progress if the folder or document is shared by you the teacher. I have found it very useful to give feedback using comments in Google Docs, which could be easily shared by G+. You can also easily run Google Hang Outs (GHOs) which is comparable to Skype, via G+. This can be excellent as students can do a GHO to help each other with work, or more importantly you can organise a GHO with an expert in the field. This is an amazing opportunity as it can extend the students experience of the subject/learning beyond a narrow curriculum and can be inspirational. The Google ecosystem can be very useful to teachers, especially as it is free to implement in schools and is now supported by the Google developed VLE, Google Classroom.
Many students are drawn to social media as it is highly visual in its nature. Tumblr, Instagram, Behance, and Pinterest are all visual in their nature. I have used Pinterest extensively in my teaching, mostly as a visual search engine. The best way to use it is to set up a class account. You can then ask the students to research using Pinterest as a search engine, and looking for key terms, such as ‘Geography.’ Individual students can then save the ‘pins’ (images) they find on their own digital boards. This ‘pins’ also saves the original URL so that the original source can be accessed later. The students can also import pins from other websites, so their research need not be restricted to what is already on Pinterest. There are no lost pieces of paper and students can collaborate by repinning each other’s pins.
Pinterest does have a social aspect to it, and students can follow other people in a way similar to Twitter. This also facilitates messaging, but in honesty my classes that have used it have not been drawn to this less obvious feature. Pinterest is fantastic as it allows students to save websites that are useful for future work. It also exposes them to ideas that they probably would not have seen in a simple Google Search. I know that Pinterest has a reputation for being full of recipes, shoes and wedding dresses - but there is also some sound academic content, with the added bonus that children can import pins from other websites, and so they can self-differentiate in terms of the level of materials they use.
Avoiding misuse of social media
So far I have explored ways in which social media can be used educationally. I think it is also worth spending some time considering apps that might cause more damage than good in an educational capacity. The first of these is Snapchat. The illusion that the images taken disappear can draw some students using the platform in a relatively risky way, in a way that they would not do on Twitter, for example. Any good PSHE e-safety lesson will tell you that once something is on the Internet, it is basically there forever. Children are taught this from a young age, and yet are happy to send potentially compromising photographs. It seems the app appears to aid the types of behaviour that we could try to discourage in our learners. I myself have not found any good uses for it in the classroom - but I am always happy to be enlightened.
The second app that can be potentially problematic for schools is Yik Yak. This is an anonymous chat app that runs on Geographical location. So your students will only be able to use it, to talk to each other anonymously when in school. Again, shielded by anonymity they say things that they never would if their name was next to the comment on Facebook or Twitter. The app developers can be contacted, and you can ask for your school to be geo-fenced. This means that the app cannot be accessed within a two mile radius of your school. If you have not yet done this, then I fully encourage you to.
The final two examples are negative ones, however, for the most part my experience of using social media in the classroom has been very positive. I would encourage teachers to see advice and guidance from others, and also to remember that there is excellent e-safety advice available from Childnet and the NSPCC. So long as you are using social media to benefit the learning of the students in your classroom (and outside it) I believe the impact will be positive in terms of both student learning and encouraging digital literacy.
Rachel Jones is a Google Certified Teacher, a Microsoft Certified Educator and an Apple Distinguished Educator. Her blog was a finalist in the 2013 EduBlog awards and 2013 Innovation Awards, and she was recommended by The Guardian as a must-read edu-blogger for 2014. She is author of books Don’t change the light bulbs and Teacher Geek: Because life is too short for worksheets.
Knowledge trails
1. The use of social media by teachers – This article discusses the importance of teachers having a good grasp and understanding of social media – the advantages it can provide and where to be cautious, given the field they work in.
http://library.teachingtimes.com/articles/elu-25-feature-6
2. Social media – Abuses in the school environment – The NASUWT teachers union used its 2014 annual conference as an opportunity to draw attention to the impact that misuse of social media is having on teachers. A survey of its members revealed that one in five teachers surveyed had experienced ‘adverse comments’ written about them online. Angela Brumpton from legal firm Hill Dickinson, considers the impact that use of social media and online forums can have in the school environment and offers some tips on steps that can be taken to counter abuse and protect staff.
http://library.teachingtimes.com/articles/social-media_040814