Social Media in the Classroom 

I choose to focus my second Micro Teaching on Social Media in the Classroom, for this lesson I choose to focus most of my time on ways to utilize Social Media, instead of providing background information on what social media is. Below you will see my outline for the lesson, the graphic above is a word cloud I created from the social media names generated during the opening activity.

Social Media: 20-minute Micro-Teaching #2

Intro activity: Give each a post-it note to jot-thought all of the social media they can come up with in 15-30 seconds. Have students report and discuss some of the common ones and how they could be used in the classroom.  (5-8 min)

–       Blogs: Student reporters for each class to post daily/weekly activities occurring in the classroom for parents and administration to view

–       Twitter: Have a # for your room for students to use and tie to other social media; Student assessment- have students synthesis material by coming up with a 140 character or less summary of the content

–       YouTube: Have students create content related videos for Blog/Facebook/etc.

–       Instagram: Pictures of daily activities in the class

–       Pinterest: Content curation of student ideas; discussion board; create a business account and make students contributors

Show 3-minute video of ways to use Pinterest in the classroom (3 min)

Social Media Exploration: Pair students off to explore social media tools for the classroom and create and submit 2-3 ways to use the tool in their classroom on the GoogleDoc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RKu6d_2so6JV2LChsNdE7y6G0_0zmy0vnDQd-vJk1j0/edit?usp=sharing  (8 min)

–       Sites include: GoodReads, Dipity, Diigo, Tiki-Toki, Edublogs, Infogr.am

–       Consider Pros and Cons of the tool being Teacher or Student driven

Thoughts to consider when implementing:

–       Personal and Professional separation

–       Don’t always need tech to implement social media concepts in the classroom

–       Teacher vs. Student driven Social Media Tools

I thought this lesson ended up going well, I did get a note from one of the students thanking me for introducing several new social media tools they had never heard of before, which was one of my goals for the lesson. I felt that I managed the time well with this lesson, even though I still forgot to set a timer to make sure I didn’t go over our 20 minute limit. Several of the students provided feedback indicating that they are planning on exploring the social media tools even further after my brief introduction, so I was very pleased to hear that.