The impact on social media in every sphere of life today cannot be overemphasized. Social media is a viable tool that doesn’t only bring smiles to our faces today, but can also help in ways beyond what we can imagine, and even importantly in education. Social media sites have grown from simply being tools for relaxation to instruments that can help tremendously in bringing about productivity in our lives.
Top social media sites have proven over time to be able to solve not just problems with social media communication and networking, but also they are doing great in communication and dissemination of vital information that is valuable to improving competence in education. It is not rare to find assignments done for money online on some of these sites and this can be a useful benefit of social media in education in aiding learning between the student and the teacher.
In this article, you will discover the educational websites that offer themselves conveniently on social media, which you can harness to help you in learning and in education.
Why and How Social Media Help in Education
We can’t deny the fact today that students spend a lot of time on social media; chatting and communicating with friends, interacting with various people on the different groups they belong to on Facebook, or following their favorite celebrities, clubs or personalities on Instagram and Twitter. All of these point to an important observation that we can leverage on and introduce education sites through these social media platforms where the students can be easily found.
Since students are much comfortable on these social media, then a union of social media and education is bound to be highly productive to the educators and even the users of education, which are in this case, the students. A lot of ease can be brought into teacher-student communication also, and students can learn to be free to write assignments or even do independently other tasks expected of them since they are working in the platform they are most familiar with in the twenty-first century – the social media. The development of social networks may even stimulate the development of new ways of scholarships, but it is too early to talk about it
Top Social Media Sites for Education
Without further ado, it is time to look at the social media websites that are doing the job of solving the puzzle of helping students’ education as well as making the assignment of educating students a success. Note that the sites provided in this post are those which are easiest to use and can prove most valuable in education with the least stress you can imagine.
1. Facebook
The popularity of Facebook is a contributing factor to its effectiveness in education. Perhaps because people don’t pay money to use Facebook, it makes it a very accessible and ready platform for information and education.
Facebook provides various groups and communities that students can join to get assignments done simply by asking questions on the groups. It is easy also for a teacher to create a group for his/her class and post questions for discussions even when the school is on break. And even, there are professional groups on Facebook where one can easily get links to resources simply by writing a question and only wait for answers to fly into your waiting hands.
2. Twitter
Twitter conversations have grown to be highly beneficial in education today. All it takes to reach your target population is to publicize the time when you wish to have your conversation with a predetermined hashtag and use it to dish out the information or subject you wish to discuss.
A quick revision on a subject or a course can be carried out a period before students write an exam or test to enable them to have an overview of the course or subject they are about to take. A good advantage of twitter is the interactivity that it allows. It enables students to ask questions and you can reply and respond to their queries and the tweets can be favorited for future reference.
3. Instagram
If you believe that students can only access pictures and videos of their people they find interesting on Instagram, you might be wrong!
Instagram can be an effective platform for education since you can post updates of assignments and tag your students once you have agreed with your students that you would post something important on your Instagram page. Also, you could tag your student and allow them to interact on any write-up you out on academics or other relevant information to their learning.
4. TedEd
While the TED Talks are popular for amazing and inspirational discussions from speakers from many disciplines of life, the TedEd is the educational variation of TED Talk which provides concise short and usually animated videos of various subjects and topics ranging from science, technology, art, literature, finance, economics and lots more. With TedEd, you can join various communities and clubs that make it easy and possible for you to engage with various intellectuals anywhere they are.
5. WordPress
One of the greatest advantages of WordPress is the creativity which it affords to a teacher to fully explain topics in the most interesting ways to students, using the best tools of learning, visuals, and illustrations to benefit them. Also, the teacher has a smooth way of communication and getting feedback from students through the platform as well.
A lot of themes are available to select from on WordPress and the Chalkboard is a theme that is specifically designed for educational use where teachers can outline lesson goals and objectives and students can easily gain track of what they are learning.
6. Blogger
The Blogger works just WordPress, in that it connects teachers to their students with various educationally-designed themes that make learning easy and tracking of learning objectives possible. Blogger makes online interaction with students highly possible and this paves way for a better and more convenient way of learning for students.
7. Skype
Whether you are in Canada and your students are in Australia, Skype offers you a comfortable way of relating with them on a real-time basis online. Skype makes it possible for various groups of instructors to teach their students various lessons and also permits conference sessions that can facilitate lessons and flow of information.
8. TeacherTube
The TeacherTube is deliberately designed to aid teaching, communication between the teacher and the students. It has some fascinating tools and options that enable this. Some of these options include audio, documents and so on. Whether it’s basic or complex learning, the TeacherTube can easily come in helpful.
9. Google+
Virtual communication outside the classroom setting can be really helpful to help the comprehension of students the concepts which they were not able to grasp in the class. Google+ has the right themes, graphics, and add-ons that provide the perfect virtual environment to help students learn easily.
10. The Connected Educator
With the edConnectr, you easily have a good rapport with fellow educators and you can share ideas and information that can aid you in becoming better at what you do. You get into the community of similar people who are in the business of educating with the best aid to modern day learning.
Yet, there are more social media sites that can help in education, and I’ll drop them here pronto:
11. Edmodo
12. Vimeo
13. Pinterest
14. WhatsApp
15. YouTube
16. Academia.edu
17. LinkedIn
18. LabRoots
19. ResearchGate
20. Twiducate
21. Blackboard
22. Wikispaces Classroom
23. MinecraftEdu
24. Edu2.0
25. TweenTribune
Regards!