It has been two years that I am not teaching. I was a
physics and math teacher at a gifted program in a Toronto high school and I
loved it. The use of new social media was not popular then and it was not even
a point of discussion among teachers. However, within these last two years
social media have found prominent presence in every aspect of life; from
education, to business, to marketing, to community organizing and even to
organizational planning. The expedited growth of both the media and the specialized
applications has no aspect of life untouched.
During my years as a teacher I was an avid user of
technology in classroom and I made it my mission to promote the integration of
technology into the classroom and started coaching other teachers to do so.
Perhaps it was my technical background that has built a confidence in me not to
be fearful of technology and to approach and use it as a tool that can be
managed to one’s benefit. However, before taking this course I had not much
thought about social media for formal K-12 teaching. To me, it predominantly
was about connecting, networking and sharing. So I began this course with a
simple question to explore social media use and concerns for teaching purposes
in formal educational settings. It soon occurred to me that social media is not
just another virtual technology to enable learning, rather it is as
sophisticated as the real world – or perhaps even more sophisticated since it
adds inerasable layers to our social life. It is redefining friendships,
relationships both personally and professionally and it is opening up our lives
to the world to look at our individual selves as well as our collective selves
(through sharing stories, events, forums, and etc.).
Becoming aware of the
complications of using social media in our professional environment in relation
to our students is one important learning I have had in the first days of this
course. Reviewing some of those small font copyright texts was indeed
informative. The potential of social media in bringing almost every story,
sometimes even live, into the classroom and get students engaged via sharing,
reflecting, contributing is so much that no teacher can disregard it anymore. I
believe those teachers who decide not to tackle on this new media are only
missing opportunities to enhance the quality of learning and engagement. Social
media is not just the technology, it is this complex web of people, their
thoughts, imaginations and stories that are connected and shared; hence the
busy image of networks in this representation image I put together. However,
the challenge is how deep and critical we engage with it. Often, our
interactions with it are just superficial. We are connecting with the images
and stories not necessarily with the sources – hence I chose to represent the
people, the sources of information all void face images! Anyhow, this course as
is shown in the image at the bottom has made my one big question mark into
several smaller question marks on the topics and words specified in the image
(which I borrowed from a classmate). My
simple conclusion for now is that I will pay utmost attention to each social
medium and try to understand its limitations and opportunities (in terms of
privacy, copy right, learning abilities) before I apply it as a tool and also,
will learn to customize each tool for specific things I can draw from it for
the benefit of the students depending on the context and the content of the
course.
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