Week 29 - The Use of Social Media in my Teaching or Professional Development

Week 29 - The Use of Social Media in my Teaching or Professional Development

I will use the reflective model from Jay and Johnson’s (2002) to critically discuss the use of Social Media in my teaching.

Step 1 - Descriptive
There are many benefits of using social media such as being a communication channel, engagement tool, and a collaboration platform (Faizi, Afia & Chiheb, 2013). In my current teaching role I have not really used much social media, there are a few barriers that seem to make it quite difficult such as our student's ages. I teach in a Junior High School and the recommended age for most social media use is 13 so ethically it doesn’t seem to be a good idea to encourage the use of social media with our students. Another barrier is that most social media is blocked at our school and can’t be accessed through our school wireless.

Step 2 - Comparative
After looking into other teachers practice I have found that when faced with the age and access barriers the teachers have engaged the caregivers. I also realised I hadn’t really thought of blogs as social media and I am currently using these very successfully to empower the students to share their learning with a wider audience. This was also found by (Magette, 2014) who stated that use of social media can lead to an engaging learning experience.

On the flipside social media use can become a distraction if it is not managed well and is implemented with a clear learning purpose as outlined by the Teachers Practice video. Mao (2014) who found that teacher attitudes and beliefs about technology can be one of the biggest barriers to effective technology integration and that students are generally very positive about the integration of social media.

Step 3 - Critical Reflection
So how might I change my attitude or more proactively problem solve and work through the barriers to include more strategic social media use? I have had a think about the tools that might be available in my context and realised that this year we are implementing a new learning management system that includes many social media features like a live news stream and that we will be opening up to our caregivers and community later in the year. So I could be using these features like updates and discussions more proactively with posts and comments focused on the learning and not just using the more formal and less collaborative assignment features. I could be exploring more of the interactive features to get the students collaborating and sharing more amongst themselves and the wider community using our LMS in a more proactive and engaging manner.

References
Education Council. (n.d.). Establishing Safe Guards. Retrieved June 21, 2018, from https://vimeo.com/49216520.

Faizi,R., Afia,A. & Chiheb, R. (2013). Exploring the potential benefits of using social media in education. International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy. 3(4), 50-53.

Jay, J.K. and Johnson, K.L. (2002). Capturing complexity: a typology of reflective practice for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 73-85..

Magette, K. (2014). Embracing social media : a practical guide to manage risk and leverage opportunity. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Mao, J. (2014). Social media for learning: A mixed methods study on high school students’ technology affordances and perspectives. Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 213–223. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.00

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/bitstr eam/han…