Social Media: Friend or Enemy to Education?

Today we are going to be checking out how some libraries are using social media! Don’t be scared, social media isn’t all bad!

The Facebook!

I stalked, ahem, followed a few libraries on Facebook an was mostly really excited about what I found. Librarians are using their library pages to high light student achievement, enlighten patrons about month themes and new literature, show school spirit and pride and showcase literary stars of the campus and community! What a great tool for sharing! I can’t tell you how many times I have been scrolling through facebook hoping for some great, positive posts and here they are! Just follow a few libraries! My particular favorite was Liberty Junior High School’s page. They had everything! Kids, staff, community, PSAs and memes. What more could you need?

 Twitter

I ventured into the Twitterverse to follow the ideas of a few educational gurus. I struggle with Twitter, but I am slowly warming up to it!  A lot of the professionals I tracked shared really great high interest posts about things like teaching kids social and professional skills in addition to  academic skills, helping educators keep HOTS (higher order thinking skills) in mind all the time during the teaching process, and actively communicating with the rest of the twitter world to answer FAQs on a daily basis! This seems more appropriate for professional use that teacher/librarian-student use because it is a really good (and brief) way of sharing links and posts from others easily.

Here’s one that I really took to heart

January 2019 Kathy’s Katch blog post up on @DiscoveryEd: Using listening to develop H.O.T.S. https://t.co/92OGNs1Jln #HappyNewYear

— Kathy Schrock (@kathyschrock) January 1, 2019

Instagram

Y’all, I am comfortable with Instagram! I have been using it in my classroom for years now to update my kids on community or school events and high light star students occasionally. It is also super handy for reminding them about upcoming assignments or events since they will check Insta before email! I especially love sharing selfies with students at campus or district events! I feel that it is very important for the kids to see us excited about their achievements and showing our school spirit! I would like to experiment with a hashtag for certain events or things I encourage the kids to take part in (like SSR outside of class!) so that we can showcase some of the pics in class! To edit my photos, I like to use Moldiv since it allows me to crop, filter, collage, stamp, sticker and add text to my photos.

All of these types of social media have their uses and come with pros and cons. Facebook is great for sharing posts, pics and websites but it becoming the way of the older generation quite quickly. Also, it can be difficult to filter who gets to see or comment on posts (in order to maintain propriety).

Twitter is pretty handy for quickly sharing things you’ve found from a variety of sources and is very easy for users to quickly scroll through. Problem: 200 characters is hard sometimes! Also, you never know what might end up trending (whether you want it to or not) and nobody wants a meme made out of a picture they are proud of.

Instgram is mostly ideal for short posts and sharing brief information. The photos have to take priority over the words because a lot of users just scroll through and don’t see words unless the image REALLY grabs their attention. But it is the handiest for quickly sharing school spirit and events photos to a lot of people!