In the present digital world, tremendous opportunities are available for improving education, unlike earlier. Teachers are expected to utilise online tools to enable the active involvement in their education. There are many positive uses of various social networking sites for changing education across all age groups. The study on usage of social media by students already engaged in social networking, conducted by University of Minnesota, revealed that they could benefit if it was incorporated in the curriculum.
Benefits of social media for education
By incorporating education with social media teachers can increase the engagement of students, better collaboration in classroom, increase in technological proficiency and also improve communication skills of the students. We have to understand clearly how students can make positive use of network technologies to help the schools become more relevant, purposeful and connected to the kids and take a step forward in changing education.
One more study was conducted to analyse the performance of students when they made use of education with social media for doing their assignments. It revealed that those students who were told to contribute towards the discussions in the class and complete the tasks assigned with the help of twitter, improved their engagement in the semester over two times than a control group. Studies have shown that social networking benefits students and also gives new scope for communication between peers and seniors.
Social media can make the assignments compelling and interesting. Students would develop better critical analytical reasoning skills, problem-solving skills, global awareness and contribution that would help in the holistic development of the student. The enhanced interaction, irrespective of age, caste, creed and race would help the students develop a global view of issues rather than being parochial.
Flip-side of social media
There is a great demand for educational reforms throughout the globe but the threat of a reduced budget indicates grim future for many public schools. In such a scenario, online tools are increasingly important to maintain the quality of education imparted to students. However with its many advantages there are some aspects of social networking due to which it is also believed to be very risky. There have been cases of sexual predators which have raised alarm and compelled legislatures and parents to question the utility of using the social media in the field of education. Having online sex talk, meet older scrupulous characters, bullying and harassment are the common threats youngsters face on social networking sites, hence a complete green signal is also not feasible.
Promoting safe and secure social media for students
Though it has been proposed in both state and federal legislation to curb using social networking in the schools; it has raised a controversy regarding legislation in this regard. Most critics believe that it is a violation of the first amendment rights to regulate online activity. However because of controversy, social networks have increased efforts for creating safer online communities. Presently Facebook is the largest site for social networking with 900 million users and it has a partnership with National PTA for promoting safe and responsible internet use for kids, teachers and also parents. It is high time educators understood that social media’s role in improving education and accept the fact that it is here to stay.
RSS
February 2nd, 2012 at 4:30 pm
[...] How Social Media Is Changing Education [...]