While I often use Twitter and Facebook for my own professional learning, I have been wary about utilizing it with my students. Some of this wariness relates to the potential dangers/issues that might pop up with social media use with young students in class, but I think most importantly this wariness is connected to my own uncertainty about how exactly it would play out in a junior classroom. How could I use it in a way that transforms the learning experience, and is not simply a redesign of a "read and respond" type of task. This blog post was an interesting and thoughtful read, encouraging me to stew all summer on how the use of social media could look in my classroom.
In an undergraduate education course I reflected in an essay:
Just as students need to be critical of the traditional modes of literacy, searching for the ways dominant texts are constructed to empower and also disenfranchise different groups, they also need to be taught how to read literary artifacts in their everyday interactions within their out-of-school communities (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010).
Furthermore as they continue to construct an identity within communities such as Facebook, we as teachers need to recognize that utilizing these spaces within the classroom puts students within a position of power, as long as they are aware of the limitations of the textual choice. We cannot ignore these literacies, nor should we. Instead educators need to harness the literacies that our students are investing in, teach them how to analyze them, and utilize them to further develop skills in critical literacy.
This reflection defends the need to incorporate and engage students in the use of social media in the classroom, and hints to the notion that students will also need supports in order to navigate these great digital tools.
Originally Posted by: andcreative
https://andcreativeblog.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/a-case-for-social-media-in-the-classroom/
