Teaching with social media: Communities of practice in a digital world
This blog series highlights educators who have embraced social media in their ongoing quest to meet students where they are, increase engagement, and improve results. Through these stories, you’ll discover how they got started, learn a few tips to make your foray into social media as seamless as possible, and hear some advice about incorporating these new technologies and platforms into your instruction or institution.
Learning is a social activity — it very rarely happens in isolation. We live in a digital world where we have access to some of the smartest, most brilliant minds anywhere, almost at the click of a mouse or the tap of a keyboard, so being able to plug in to these networks in whatever form that is most meaningful to the user is important.
Importance of teacher communities
I’m a proponent of Twitter, but there are some educators who look at it and say “I could never be involved in something like that for one reason or another.” They find it overwhelming, or they can’t find what they need.
The key is to get hooked into a community, because “alone we’re smart, but together we’re brilliant.”
So when we work together, and share and reflect and grow together as professionals, the impact on our students can be tremendous. And it doesn’t really matter what platform you choose, the key is to become connected to one another.
That then again shows students that learning is a very social activity. But it also shows them that these platforms can help build skills like digital citizenship and digital literacy, which are increasingly more important in understanding where our information comes from.
"I’m focused on helping make sure that we create a generation of educators and students who value digital literacy and who can use these tools in positive ways to impact themselves and their communities, and also connect with other people to share, grow, and exchange ideas."
Finding your community
There’s a community of thousands of social media-using educators out there who want to share and grow this community of practice. There are whole sites dedicated to connecting authors to classrooms through Skype and groups of experts who are willing to connect with a class for 15–20 minutes. It’s just a matter of tapping in and reaching out.
In the end, educators who utilize social media to engage themselves or their classrooms will ultimately say it had a tremendous impact on how their students interact with the world. Because it does give voice to the voiceless and allows us to engage in ways that weren’t possible five or ten years ago.
Favorite strategy
I like when schools use tools like Instagram and Snapchat stories to share what it’s like to be a student in the classroom. Sharing things like blogs and videos are really effective.
The social media sometimes is just the medium through which content and learning are shared, with the goal of reaching a much wider community of users and learners. Social media can show students that what they say and what they do matters and amplifies their voice.
Dive deeper
Join #Edchat — a weekly organized Twitter discussion of educators and people interested in education that meet virtually from all over the world.
About the author
Steven W. Anderson
Steven W. Anderson is a learner, blogger, speaker, educational evangelist, author, and dad. He holds a bachelor’s degree in middle grade math and a master’s in Instructional Technology from East Carolina University. He regularly travels the country talking about the use of social media in the classroom and better serving students through technology.
Mr. Anderson has been a presenter and keynoter at several educational technology conferences, including ISTE, ASCD, TCEA, FETC, TETA, and VSTE as well as numerous state and local conferences. He is the author of three books, The Relevant Educator: How Connectedness Empowers Learning, The Tech-Savvy Administrator, and Content Curation: How To Avoid Information Overload. He also co-created #edchat, the weekly education discussion on Twitter.
