I am a huge proponent of collaborative work as educators. Throughout the last few weeks, as we were posting about all of the ORL’s, I was thinking about how many resources I have taken and modified off of Instagram or Facebook. At the district level, I feel like I most often see this in the form of a website, Weebly or Google Site. Although, as an agriculture teacher, I would also obtain resources from teachers across Colorado and throughout the US. Some teachers that I regularly would check social media for ideas from include an agriculture education teacher from the midwest. She had content for each pathway that I could modify and teach with agriculture. There is also a Facebook group for ag teachers where they post ideas for all content, including how to run the FFA chapter and work with the FFA chapter officers. I also have used Facebook and other social media sources to gather information from others in order to provide lessons for my students. For example, asking others to send me soil samples, so my students can test different types of soils from across the state. I have also asked past FFA members to share their story as a recruiting strategy for my agriculture program. Collaboration in my new position has been essential pre and during the pandemic. Working with collaborative avenues with league athletic directors via Google Docs, Google Meet and Google Forms has been imperative to our success in conducting business for our league as well as schools.
Social media is also a great way to enhance collaboration, share data and resources and group work progress updates (Learning, 2019). Social media can be a great resource for education and classrooms, but it is of the utmost importance that we continuously monitor our students’ social media that is in correlation with our classwork. In my personal opinion, I think it is vital that we teach students how to appropriately use technology before they learn how to use it for malicious purposes before then. There are several ways and multiple reasons to use social media in the classroom, like, communicating with parents, hosting pools for student surveys, posting pictures of student field trips or hands-on activities or connecting with other classes (Lynch, 2018). In my career in the classroom I used social media platforms for awareness campaigns and calls to action for important agricultural issues in agriculture business class. As an athletic director it has been imperative to inform parents and supporters of happenings within the athletic department and specific sports. I have also used these platforms to showcase athletes to the community but have also used them as a recruiting tool for prospective colleges. I host a mandatory seminar for parents and athletes to teach them proper uses of social media accounts when it comes to athletics, as students have lost scholarships and even participation on teams to poor choices made over social media. This is not limited to athletes as well, I have researched many college bound students with great academic scholarship opportunities who have been stripped of their award dollars due to negative and unbecoming social media posts. Some may have happened many years prior to receiving an honor.
Some of the outstanding information I share with our student athletes and parents can be found at https://www.socialschool4edu.com/Links to an external site. I highly recommend sharing this information with students if you are going to use social media in education.
References:
Learning, W. (2019, February 26). 4 of the best social media teaching tips for educators. Retrieved August 21, 2020, from https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/social-media-teaching-tips
Lynch, M. (2018, August 06). 22 ways to use social media in your classroom. Retrieved August 21, 2020, from https://www.theedadvocate.org/22-ways-use-social-media-classroom/
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