Key takeaways
- Social media integration enhances educational experiences by facilitating parental engagement, showcasing student work, and fostering creativity through platforms like Instagram.
- Pinterest serves as a valuable resource hub for educators, offering diverse materials, creative homework assignments, and collaborative opportunities for students.
- Utilizing Facebook groups promotes group work, closed discussions, and whole-school collaboration, enhancing connectivity, engagement, and communication within the educational community.
To help you understand how you can use social media in the classroom, we’ve written a guide explaining how you can introduce it into your class so you and your students can start embracing this technology.
Social media and education work hand in hand together. When you’re well versed in how these sites can be exploited to your advantage you can start using them to share best practices, engage parents, and boost your students’ confidence. To help get you started we’ve created a quick guide for Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook explaining how you can introduce these sites into your classroom so you and your students can start fully embracing technology.
Increase parental engagement
You can do this by uploading pictures of students’ work and any class trips or school events. These will give parents a visual snapshot of what goes on in your class and the activities their child is doing.
Share student work
Uploading pictures of students’ work to Instagram with relevant hashtags, especially more creative subjects, is a great way to get their work seen, and the interaction they receive can help to boost their confidence.
Set tasks
You can get creative with the class tasks, you’re setting by setting them via Instagram. Try asking students to create a storyboard or a picture story. Each student can take turns uploading a photo and use the description box to tell a story.
Tips for new teacher success
Resources
Pinterest is great for finding classroom resources for you and your students to use, and also for uploading resources for students to access.
Homework
A fun way to use Pinterest is to add some excitement to what otherwise may be seen as boring homework. When setting research tasks, ask students to display all the information they’ve found and gathered on a Pinterest board.
Collaboration
Pinterest is an easy, fun, and new way for students to work together either as a whole class or in groups. Having a classroom Pinterest board means that when brainstorming ideas everyone can put the individual snippets of information in one place.
Group work
For group assignments, encourage students to connect with one another over Facebook. Facebook groups are a great way for your class to collaborate and work together with the ability to upload and share files. It also means that they can stay connected and in touch over the holidays and weekends.
Closed work
Students can use closed groups for group work and they can also be utilized by you, as the teacher. If you teach a number of different classes for the same subject and are covering the same topic, start up a Facebook group. These can easily spark debate and create discussion. Alternatively, simply posting questions in these groups to promote discussion could act as a different and engaging homework piece.
Whole-school collaboration
An easy way to get whole schools and departments to embrace technology is to create Facebook pages. Posting relevant updates will promote parental engagement and help them to stay up-to-date.
Try building social media into your lesson plans for increased student engagement and interaction.
The support teachers wish they had
Conclusion
Integrating social media into your classroom offers exciting opportunities to enhance engagement, collaboration, and creativity among students. By leveraging platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook, you can foster stronger connections with parents, showcase student achievements, and create dynamic learning environments. Embrace these tools as valuable resources to enrich your teaching practices and empower your students to thrive in the digital age. Let's embark on this journey together, exploring the endless possibilities social media brings to education and making learning even more enjoyable and interactive for everyone involved.
Author: Bethany Spencer
Posted: 11 Feb 2020
Estimated time to read: 5 mins
