Social media in education
[3] As time went on and technology evolved, social media has been an integral part of people's lives, including students, scholars, and teachers.
[4] However, social media are controversial because, in addition to providing new means of connection, critics claim that they damage self-esteem, shortens attention spans, and increase mental health issues.
Despite backlash, Missouri passed a law that prohibited teachers from communicating privately with students over social media in 2011.
A Yale University publication reported that students who used laptops in class for non-academic reasons had poorer performance.
[17] Social media offer a venue for video calls, stories, feeds, and game playing that can enhance the learning process.
Instructors in a 2010 study reported that online technologies (social media) can help students become comfortable having discussions outside the classroom better than traditional means.
[23] Studies explores how college students' engagement with social media platforms influences their communication preferences and habits, particularly in relation to using school email for academic purposes.
Research delves into the global reach of social media, emphasizing its role in transcending geographical boundaries and fostering cross-cultural exchanges.
[25] Social media can aid professional development, as teachers become students, enhancing knowledge transfer, skill master, and collaboration.
[29] By offering easier access to peers outside the classroom, students can broaden their perspectives and find support resources.
[30] Apps like X allowed teachers to make classroom accounts where students can learn about social media in a controlled context.
Some studies particularly refer to the convenience that social media offers for shy students and youngsters who are thus enabled to exchange and express views.
[34] Many American classrooms created social media pages where teachers post assignments and interact with students.
[36] Using Facebook in class allows for both asynchronous and synchronous speech via a familiar medium that supports multimodal content such as photographs, video, and links to other pages and sites.
[37] Further, the level of informality typical to Facebook can aid self-expression and encourage more frequent student-and-instructor and student-and-student interactions.
Facebook may be less efficient than conventional course management systems, both because of its limitations in uploading assignments and due to resistance to its use in education.
Specifically, some features of student-to-student collaboration may be conducted more efficiently on dedicated systems that support organization of posts in a nested/linked format.
A 2013 study utilized X in a graduate seminar, requiring students to post weekly to extend classroom discussions.
[48] A 2012 study reported that videos kept students' attention, generated subject matter interest, and clarified course content.
It has the basic features of any social media site - writing, videos, replies and messages are the main usages by workers.
Teachers and students use it to create channels for class discussions, share resources, and manage group assignments.
Public and private channels make it easy to declare a difference between transparency and inclusivity and a selected audience.
Additionally, its union with other apps like Google Drive and Zoom enable seamless workflows, particularly in remote learning environments.
Studies by Maqableh, Quteshat, Masadeh, and Huda Karajeh in 2015 did not demonstrate negative impacts of social media on students.
[57][19] This led many schools to block Internet access (including social media), or to ban phones in the classroom.
Her so-called friends had called her names the evening before.”[59] Since the 2010s, debate has continued about whether phones and social media have a place in the classroom.
One survey of teens and young adults reported that increased use of social media led to anxiety, depression, and lack of self-esteem, disrupting learning.
[66] Anxiety and depression in adolescents are rapidly increasing, which multiple studies attributed to growing social media usage by teens.
Social media can amplify feelings of loneliness among teenagers when they constantly measure themselves against the versions of others' lives portrayed online.
[70] Social media makes students view their fellow teachers and school system more positively when it becomes present that it was a part of their curriculum.
