According to the Pew Research Center, “Teens credit social media for helping to build stronger friendships and exposing them to a more diverse world, but they express concern that these sites lead to drama and social pressure.” I will reflect on some questions I thought of while reading this article.
How can social media provide diversity for students?
- Interact with people from other cultures
- Learn about a world they did not realize was out there
- Connect through interests and similarities
- Join groups and forums
What issues do we run into when using social media in school?
- Appropriate content
- Social burdens, such as pressure to post things that will get likes or comments
- Posts need to add to social status
- Hostile environment
- Cyberbullying and other drama filled online interactions
What activities can utilize social media in a classroom?
- Learning to be concise and think critically
- Writing short paragraphs for Instagram or Snapchat stories
- Presentations
- Using a Snapchat story as a form of PowerPoint slides
- Would have access to using different fonts, colors, filters, etc.
- Able to make a presentation more unique
- Pen Pals
- Social media has opened the world up to communicating across cultures
- Pen pals can help students develop written language skills or verbal language skills (depending on which platform used)
Why are students hesitant to write about religious or political beliefs?
There can be a lot of backlash for adults who post their religious and political beliefs on social media. When I have encountered these posts, I notice the enormous amount of comments. The comments display many negative opinions and reactions to the user’s post.
I think this kind of hostile environment would make anyone avoid these kinds of posts. In our society, it is taboo to discuss religion and politics. This has made it more difficult when things need to be brought up. Social media only adds to the tensions because people can hide behind usernames and post/comment anything.
Overall, I found this article to be very useful. The statistics about teens opinions on social media helped clarify and brought to light different questions I have about using social media in my classroom.