Howard Stribbell's Engaging Your School Community Through Social Media

Business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and billionaire Carlos Slim once said, “You cannot make thousands of universities or hundreds of thousands of professors, but with technology and the Internet you can have great courses and make a digital university.” Many teens and adults actively use social media, for many different reasons. However, many schools block or ban the use of social media on campus. Schools could benefit a lot from using social media; either for certain classes, or have an interactive schoolwide page. Schools can even use social media for learning. Although many people don’t like or agree with social media, schools should start to use it, and allow students to use it in school, because it can help teachers easily interact

In an article titled “Engaging Your School Community Through Social Media” by Howard Stribbell, the author says, “our teachers use Twitter to celebrate what they are doing in their classrooms, ask questions, share resources, and document their learning. It's had a profound effect on our staff. By creating a school hashtag, we are able to thread all of our school-based tweets.” Many social media outlets, such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and the like, have things like commenting (among other things) one could use to communicate with a parent or child. For example, maybe you post about a certain assignment, and a parent, student, or another teacher comments on that asking a question about it. You could easily reply to that in a few seconds, and in my opinion, simply writing or replying to a comment is easier than a parent writing an email or calling a teacher. One may argue that the commenting function could be misused between students, which is understandable. On most platforms, there is an option to delete comments or replies; and on some, you can block comments or replies on a post. Also, the teacher could just simply threaten various harsh punishments, like suspension, detention, denying them use of social media in school, etc. on students who misuse that function. Also, other than writing and replying to comments from parents, a teacher could also share homework and assignments

There are countless creative and fun ways a teacher could use social media for learning. “10 Surprising Ways to Use Instagram in the Classroom” by Hannah Hudson describes some very good strategies, such as: showcasing student work each week, a field trip “photographer”, sharing reading recommendations and “book reviews”, and even posting photos for writing inspiration (“Tap an “inspiration fairy” to take 10 photos that could serve as a prompt for writing—an empty bird’s nest, a For Sale sign, or a broken doll, for instance.”) Perhaps a student who usually has no interest in learning or doing classroom activities could find ones like these new, fun, and exciting. They would have more of a desire to learn and participate in class if they found something fun and interactive to be passionate about. Subsequently, they are likely to get better grades and be more eager to do their