Teaching with social media: Bring your knowledge to their platforms
This blog series highlights educators who have embraced social media in their ongoing quest to meet students where they are, increase engagement, and improve results. Through these stories, you’ll discover how they got started, learn a few tips to make your foray into social media as seamless as possible, and hear some advice about incorporating these new technologies and platforms into your instruction or institution.
Adding social media into your classes to engage with students and enhance teaching and learning is hard work. The key is getting started. The longer you wait, the harder it is.
Start with a platform that you’re most comfortable with. Once you taste the benefits and you see the excitement of students, you’ll feel more motivated to study and explore more digital tools, to bring more to the classrooms.
"Embrace your students’ mentality: never stop learning."
It’s okay not to know
You don’t have to know everything — you have to be willing to figure things out and teach your students how to do this. We’re in an age where we need to be okay saying, “You know, I don’t have an answer for this question. Let’s go figure it out together.”
Because the knowledge they’re learning in the classroom will be outdated by the time they graduate. So, what they need to learn is to have the skills, the ability to figure things out on their own.
Using social media to teach is not the future, it is now.
Learning outside the classroom
If higher ed professors don’t see the trend, don’t try to catch up, I think the relevance of traditional higher education is going to be decreasing sharply. Higher education is so expensive. If you can learn from industry experts through social media at a much lower cost, why not?
Those alternative learning platforms and certifications are gaining more and more credibility — they’re actually competing with the traditional education space. This shareability leads to visibility, which enhances employability. Students need to understand that, and teachers need to facilitate that.
There are so many ideas for how you can bring learning outside the classroom. I believe in a classroom without walls. That is the power of digital tools and social media, to break down the systems and the physical barriers that separate and limit learning.
Favorite strategy
My personal favorite is live streaming on Twitter, Periscope, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube™. When you go live, you aren’t just disseminating information, you’re co-creating content with your audience. And you’re fostering peer-to-peer interactions as people in your audience engage with one another. Professionals and students from other classes can join you, and students can watch the replay and share the content with others.
Dive deeper
Join my Facebook group, Classroom Without Walls, to discuss topics related to the intersections of social media/technology and education.
About the author
Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang
Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang is an associate professor of public relations at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey. She is an advocate of using social media and digital media devices in the classroom as a teaching tool and conducts research in this area. She earned her PhD in Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication from The University of Maryland.
Dr. Zhang is a digital learning consultant, blogger (the top writer in social media on Medium), and live streamer. She offers workshops to help educators learn how to use social media to enhance their professional and teaching careers. Dr. Zhang’s entrepreneurial journey as an educator has recently been featured in Forbes, and she has also been voted as one of the Top 100 Corporate eLearning Movers and Shakers in 2018.
