Ideas for incorporating social media into the classroom

I found the following list on the Edutopia website and thought it would serve as a good base for an interesting discussion (Davis, 2014).

12 Ways Teachers are Using Social Media in the Classroom Right Now from A Guidebook for Social Media in the Classroom. 

  

1. Tweet or post status updates as a class. Teacher Karen Lirenman lets students propose nuggets of learning that are posted for parents to read.
2. Write blog posts about what students are learning. Teacher Kevin Jarrettblogs reflections about his Elementary STEM lab for parents to read each week.
3. Let your students write for the world. Linda Yollis' students reflect about learning and classroom happenings.
4. Connect to other classrooms through social media. Joli Barker is fearlessly connecting her classroom through a variety of media.
5. Use Facebook to get feedback for your students' online science fair projects. Teacher Jamie Ewing is doing this now, as he shared recently.
6. Use YouTube for your students to host a show or a podcast. Don Wettrick's students hosted the Focus Show online and now share their work on a podcast.
7. Create Twitter accounts for a special interest projects. My studentMorgan spent two years testing and researching the best apps for kids with autism (with the help of three "recruits"), and her work just won her an NCWIT Award for the State of Georgia.
8. Ask questions to engage your students in authentic learning. Tom Barrett did this when his class studied probability by asking about the weather in various locations.
9. Communicate with other classrooms. The Global Read Aloud, Global Classroom Project and Physics of the Future are three examples of how teachers use social media to connect their students as they collaborate and communicate.
10. Create projects with other teachers. (Full disclosure: I co-created Physics of the Future with Aaron Maurer, a fellow educator I first met on Twitter.)
11. Share your learning with the world. My students are creating anEncyclopedia of Learning Games with Dr. Lee Graham's grad students at the University of Alaska Southeast. The educators are testing the games, and the students are testing them, too.
12. Further a cause that you care about. Mrs. Stadler's classes are working to save the rhinos in South Africa, and Angela Maiers has thousands of kids choosing to matter.

I fully support these ideas and would add that popular sites such as Instagram could be incorporated into visual arts, home economics, photography courses on a regular basis and could be used to share progress on home projects to discourage procrastination on big projects.  One of the important considerations in incorporating the use of these resources is to think critically about the benefits of using them and making sure that their use is well-substantiated.

Another concern that I have is the use of technology within a face-to-face classroom and the difficulty of keeping students on track and effective use of firewalls.  Lastly, more and more, cyber-bullying is an issue in the communities of younger online users and this must be kept in mind when teachers require online participation of their students.