Help! Getting Your Remote Students to Participate by Using Social Media
By: Angela Floratos
Tags: Distance Learning, Remote Learning, Social Media, Education, Edtech

It’s 1:45 p.m. on a Tuesday, and what do Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok all have in common? They are all much more appealing to a middle schooler, stuck at home in quarantine for the past 9 months, than your timely spent and expertly crafted remote lesson plans are at this moment. You might be wondering to yourself, “How do I get them to participate, to have a discussion, or to just show any interest in this topic at all?” To put it short and sweet: The key is to take social media platforms that they have already immersed themselves in and use them to your advantage.

Stick to what you know about teaching and educational learning theories but take this opportunity to grow. Right now, your lessons are probably immersive, thought-provoking, and stimulating, and don’t let anyone tell you that they aren’t! We have all proven how dynamic we can be in a global pandemic, switching up our style of teaching at the last minute. However, none of us are over-night experts. The field of educational technology has been around for longer than this pandemic, and as educators we must look to this research for guidance. Constructivist learning theory states that learners construct their own knowledge as they experience the world. Experiences, like the one’s students have online, should not be undermined. Mattar (2018) discusses how experiential learning emphasizes the importance of experience in constructing knowledge. In the digital age, students experience social media every day, and in order to compete for interest, teacher’s need to provide similar experiences in their digital classrooms.

The first thing to consider is your social media platform. You might be thinking, “So, am I just supposed to make a Facebook page for my Classroom? Then what? How do I ensure it has an educational purpose in my classroom?” Great questions! It can be a Facebook page, but it doesn’t have to be. Consider using an LMS, or a learning management system, such as Edmodo, Canva, or EdApp. Anderson (2017) states that the LMS consists of a bundle of tools that are made available to teachers and, importantly, a structure into which they can fit many of their current teaching activities and processes. These include content sharing, interaction, calendar, enrolment, collaboration and assessment capabilities. Even Google Classroom can be considered an LMS, although the ones previously mentioned can do much more in terms of class discussion and content sharing for your students.

Here is an idea of how to integrate a lesson with any of these LMS systems. The teacher posts a question about today’s lesson on the stream. Perhaps the lesson was about figurative language. The question asks students to post an example of figurative language under the status post on the stream. This could be an example from a famous poem or short story they researched themselves online. They must label the question with what kind of figurative language their example represents: Metaphor, simile, etc. Students must then comment on other’s students replies and explain the literal meaning of their peer’s figurative language post. This tool promotes communication and further exploration on the topic, in an online forum discussion format that students are all familiar with.

If you do decide to integrate familiar social network platforms, Twitter is a great place to start. According to Anderson (2017), A key feature of social networks is they are much more open and porous than LMS systems. Connection in social networks typically cross boundaries, support both strong and weak connections and allow knowledge to expand outside of the formal education context. Twitter is a goldmine of relevant articles for your students to share and explore with each other. They can either use their personal Twitter accounts or they can create an account specifically for a course that is meant to extend their thinking beyond in-class content. Twitter also allows its users to explore various topics via hashtags. Creating a hashtag specifically for your class can help organize everyone’s contributions in one spot.

You should also consider using memes in your assignments. Yes, the pictures with funny captions on them that your students share back and forth to each other outside of school. Did the word sharing in that last sentence ring any bells for you? Anything to spark conversation between students should be utilized. According to Shifman (2013), memes often relate to each other in complex, creative, and surprising ways. A teacher that can relate pop culture to course work has effectively branched a real-life connection for their students.

Integrating social media promotes learning that is student centered instead of teacher centered. Often times, teachers harbor too much control in their lessons because they worry that student’s will find themselves off-track without their overbearing guidance. This hinders the constructivist process of exploration and, as a result, takes away from the interest a student finds in building on their own knowledge. Allow students the freedom to make connections outside of the classroom, either to a movie they have just watched or a relevant article they want to share with their peers. Giving students an organized platform to conduct this exploration can be beneficial to everyone involved.

Citations:

Mattar, J. (2018). Constructivism and connectivism in education technology: Active, situated, authentic, experiential, and anchored learning. RIED. Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 21(2), pp. 201–217. doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.5944/ried.21.2.20055

Anderson, T., & Dron, J. (2017). Integrating learning management and social networking systems. Italian Journal of Educational Technology, 25(3), 5–19. doi: 10.17471/2499–4324/950

Shifman, Limor. Mit Press Essential Knowledge : Memes in Digital Culture, MIT Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pace/detail.action?docID=3339690.