February 2008 — News
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Social Media: How to 'Sell It' to Your Team
Social media is something that many younger teachers will have a familiarity with outside of the classroom. Ask any colleague under the age of, say, 30, and it's fairly likely that he or she will have a profile on a social network like Facebook or MySpace. Business-facing social networks like LinkedIn have also seen explosive growth from educators in the last year.
"Education management is one of the top five fastest growing segments on our network," said LinkedIn's director of corporate communications, Kay Luo. The "education management" category includes classroom teachers.
But for educators who are champions of new technologies, getting any kind of social media program going in schools is a serious challenge. A significant portion of districts ban even the tamest forms of social media. So just to get started, you'll need to find ways to broach the subject without scaring off stakeholders. That means focusing on the form of social media right for your school; tying a social media program into learning objectives; and finding the right ways to break the ice with administrators, IT/technology directors, and other teachers.
What Forms of Social Media Are Out There?
Don’t think that social media only includes social networks; they are only one bucket of social media; forums, blogs, wikis, aggregators (collections of blogs), podcasts, vodcasts and microformats (machine-readable media) are other often-overlooked forms of social media that should be considered when making initial forays into social media.
What Is the Educational/Community Value of Social Media?
Just as businesses looking to implement social media solutions need to tie their programs to core business objectives, classroom teachers, curriculum planners, and administrators looking to implement some type of social media solution need to tie their program to a learning objective. Is there a specific expected schoolwide learning objective that you're trying to meet? Remember, you can't effectively tie a social media program to a technology-based learning objective.
The goal of a social media program is in simple terms to foster and enhance communication between people and to socialize learning; the technology skills needed by students and staff to execute a program of this nature need already to be in place, and if they're not, then technology objectives (Netiquette, e-mail literacy, search literacy, basic multimedia literacy, password creation, keyboarding, mousing) need to be completed first.
It's clear that social media properties such as Facebook are highly trafficked by students; according to a 2007 study by the National School Boards Association, students spend nearly as much time on the Internet visiting Web sites and social networking services as they do watching television: nine hours per week for teens.
To "sell" your team on the value of using social media in the classroom, you may need to look beyond tactical technology-related learning objectives and hone in on core curriculum objectives.
