Facebook and Twitter may be ubiquitous, but there are many other social media tools out there that can enhance teaching and learning. Here, three educators share their favorites.
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Social media has changed the way people communicate and share information in their personal and professional lives. It’s a safe bet that most students in any college classroom have used or are familiar with sites like Facebook and Twitter. Yet surprisingly, some instructors have felt resistance from students when they try to incorporate common social media tools into the classroom.
“For a lot of them, it’s their friends on Twitter, and they don’t really want to share their homework or talk with their teacher on Twitter,” said Seth Dixon, an assistant professor of geography at Rhode Island College. “When I announced that I wanted them using Twitter and connecting things and using class hashtags, they gave me this look of, ‘Oh, no!’ like their mom was on Facebook now.”
While Dixon still uses Twitter with his students, he makes it optional, and he finds that he gets less push-back using alternative social media tools with his classes. “It’s not as though you’re snooping in on their Facebook or Twitter,” he said. “So it has that element where it’s no longer this awkward divide between being a student or professor, or is it appropriate or not. It lends itself toward being very normal that way.”
CT asked three educators to share their favorite alternative social media tools for teaching and learning.
1) VoiceThread
VoiceThread lets people upload and share images, videos and documents and then have an online conversation about each other’s posts through audio, video or text comments. Alexandra Pickett, director of the Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence and an adjunct instructor at SUNY Albany, started using VoiceThread in 2006, primarily as an icebreaking activity in her online course. She introduces herself to her students through an informal video of herself at home with her daughter, so her students can get a full picture of who she is, professionally and personally. “One of the things that you want to do initially in an online course is to establish a sense of social presence among the participants in the course and with the students,” said Pickett. “And so I want to represent myself as a real person because that way they know that I’m real; I’m not a robot, I’m approachable, I am multidimensional.” She then invites her students to start a conversation about the importance of social presence in an online course.
Pickett likes the ability to have a conversation in multiple media. “It gives students a lot of options and flexibility in how to present themselves and in how to interact with a learning activity set up by the instructor or a presentation that they might be doing, so there are a lot of ways to use this tool instructionally,” she said.
Pickett said her students usually start out using VoiceThread’s text tool. To encourage them to branch out to audio and video, she models all of the different methods of interaction, and she makes it a “very low barrier in terms of expectations.” Some students are initially very formal and scripted in their posts and responses, so she also encourages them to relax and be more conversational. She models that conversational style in her own posts, but experience has taught her that she also needs to explicitly state her expectations for a casual, conversational tone.
According to Pickett, VoiceThread is easy to use and its functionality is intuitive. “It allows you to make the material that you’re talking about more engaging visually as well as in terms of interaction. It’s less passive than just reading text.”
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