Did you know?
- Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
- iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months
- 80 percent of companies use social media for requirement
- YouTube is the second largest search engine of the world
- Twitter recorded 200+Million tweets per day in 2011
After seeing these facts, you can truly understand how social media is taking off in the 21st century. Today, social media is not used to stay connected with friends and family but also for other purpose like professional learning, networking and researching.
The involvement of social media in education has given a new dimension to this industry. With the presence of social media in education industry, teaching has changed drastically. The importance of social media has increased not just for students but also for the teachers. Although, at times most of the parents do not take use of social media in education positively, they think it can do more harm than benefit. But this combination (teen students+ social media) is a great one if teachers understand and help students to make effective use of this social media to build their knowledge base.
Information Literacy
Information literacy means having the ability to recognize the quality of information. This is very much necessary in this digital era where information is easily accessible within a few second. Although, there is no particular way to learn how to analysis the quality of information, but it can be possible only when teacher’s guidance.
Use of social media under the strict guidance of teacher can help student to evaluate the quality of information. After collecting the information, students should be able to synthesize and present. This process of creating, analyzing and evaluating information with proper exposure in social media helps student to develop critical thinking.
In this entire process, the role of teacher or the importance of teacher is critical because they are the one who guide their students in this process.
Better and Increased Communication
Various social media websites like Facebook offers great platform for study purpose. Educators can use Facebook to set up the pages related to their lesson plans. Using online platform, students can easily collaborate with each other, even shy students can participate more actively. Through various other platforms like Google Hangout or Skype, teachers can easily initiate discussions or debate.
All these social media platforms assist teachers to increase communication with their students. They can effectively communicate and encourage even shy students to participate actively.
Effective Lesson Plans
Lesson Planning becomes easy and effective with social media tools like Instagram and Pinterest. It enables teachers to easily upload photos and graphics related to their lesson plan. Teachers can also use Twitter and Facebook to guide their students in research projects with links. Today, Twitter is one of the best platform that helps teachers and students to create professional learning networks.
Teachers can also record the session and upload it to YouTube, so that they (student) can view or access it when they are struggling with their homework in their home. This is one of the effective ways of teaching where students can learn at their own pace.
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