7 Educational Benefits of Social Media

Why experiment with some new platform and cause chaos and confusion among the students when you can use the most familiar and frequently used social media platform i.e., Facebook. It is the best and the most suited platform for educational purposes.

All you have to do is create a Facebook page for your class and have your students follow that page. Once the platform is set and ready to be used, the instructors can post daily homework, assignments, or any major update about the class on that page. You can also enhance student engagement by initiating any kind of course-related discussion on that page as well.

The major benefit of using Facebook is that it is accessible to students who are not active during class times for some reason. They can access the page whenever they log in to their accounts and access content that is there. With every new update, Facebook is introducing new features to make the experience better and better for both students and teachers.

Social media live is the most popular feature on all social media platforms. This feature saw its peak especially in 2020 because of Covid-19 causing almost all professional, educational, and recreational activities to move online.

Facebook Live is the most convenient and approachable way to take classes, engage with your students, discuss assignments and projects, etc. you can create a public or private group, as per your choice and ease, add your students to that group, and only then your students will be able to have access to your Facebook Live.

You should make sure that you maintain a professional environment during this interaction. It does not sound appropriate for a teacher to be sending friend requests to his or her students. To remedy that, you can send links, for joining the group, to the students and their parents through a professional email. These live sessions are the best online platforms that ensure a convenient and accessible means of communication for both teachers and students.

Twitter, with its 280 words limit, is the best medium for concise and effective communication among the teachers and the students. In addition to being a tool for information, it is a way of teaching critical communication skills to the students so that they can learn to express themselves concisely and more powerfully.

The teacher can create a single account per class or can reuse it, at his/her convenience. Twitter pages make great discussion boards for students. They can also be used to post reminders for assignments or quizzes or act as a source for providing links to practice quizzes or other course content.

Instagram is a great platform for visual content. Owing to its versatile features, it can be used as a tool for educational evaluations of students. For classes involving poster making, storytelling, or any other content format requiring visual creativity, Instagram is indeed the best platform.

You can also create an Instagram introductory account for your class. There you can post the achievements of students as a token of encouragement for them to work harder in the future.

It is another effective way of increasing student engagement on social media for educational purposes. You can create a blog for your class that can act as a focal point for linking all the social media accounts of your class. Platforms like WordPress, Tumblr, Squares pace, and Wix let you create blogs, and to participate in discussions, the students will have to create their own user accounts.

These blogs can be used as a reminder for assignments and projects, share syllabus-related links, and any other kind of update regarding the class. Moreover, these blogs can also be used to share relevant information and studies related material.

It is a creative way of combining learning and social media. You can assign students to write and manage these blogs as a part of their semester or year-long class assignments. This activity will not only enhance their writing skills but also help students sharpen their critical thinking.

You can also ask your students to respond to weekly prompts. This is not specific to writing classes only. You can also use it as an engagement medium for almost any subject you want.

As a teacher, you can use Pinterest to organize lesson plans, prepare worksheets for classes and manage academic resources. These boards should be class-specific with subtopic boards for weekly units. You can also pin course-relevant content on Pinterest boards to help your students have a better understanding of the subject.

As far as student use is concerned, Pinterest is a great platform for curating digital bibliography for your research projects and group assignments. You can search for relevant content and then pin it to be used whenever needed.