I have not had to use social media for education or professional uses before this year.
I am very comfortable with social media for entertainment/ socialising purposes and opened my Facebook account when I was 10 (which was totally not allowed by terms and services I’m pretty sure). I am of the generation where parents and teachers had no idea what social media was, and what their kids were doing on it. Luckily, I never had any bad encounters on social media but do regret using my first and last name for most of those accounts.
Now, parents and educators can guide students into social media by teaching them privacy and safety precautions while also teaching them how to start and add to a conversation and connect. Although I was unable to attend the guest speaker from last Tuesday’s class, I did watch one of his TEDx Talks. In this talk I learned how young minds engage with social media and how likes, shares and followers promote feelings of success and importance. Children might not understand the power of digital communications. Although, there are negatives associated with children and social media, the speaker says, rather than raising negative awareness, the message should be of positive change. We should raise positive connections, conversations highlighting our shift as a society addressing a need for media literacy in a connected world. He mentions a mistake that guardians and educators do is warn children of predators and scare them, but the real thing to taken as a threat is their own actions.
Like me, children have the ability to put anything on the internet without fear of the future, because they simply do not think about it because everything is documented.
Now, I am, like we are trying to get children to do, learning to use social media as a tool for media literacy and turning the device outward rather than inward.
I recently opened a professional twitter, that I intend to use to gather information from those connected to me and education. I am still unsure of what to post because that previous validation concern of people not interacting with my posts still looms around me. It doesn’t feel great when people don’t care about what you have to say, and it feels like “what’s the point” of posting when you have less than ten followers. I’d like to grow my connections for the future through school, and work and hopefully then I’ll feel like I can add to the conversation.
I recently started using tweetdeck. I also did not see the point of it when I first opened my twitter account. Now, I am following more accounts and am starting to organise the contents of my news-feed. I find this especially helpful for finding course-specific information, where before I had to bookmark the specific hashtag, and also flip back-and-forth between that and my twitter homepage.
I never considered blogging a form of social media, but it really is. I feel like in these entries, I am just writing in a personal journal but with a cause. I have checked my analytics and have found that most or all of the views are from me showing friend and family as well as me checking my site out. I think blogging for students could be a fantastic outlet for developing literacy, reflection and self-regulation skills while also becoming digitally literate. I am a strong believer of frequent journal-writing in the classroom and just finished a research paper on the benefits it could hold for children both academically and emotionally. I believe blogging could do all of which I said plus help students explore digital media.
Lessons with Leson 