The first step towards applying social media into education starts with empowering teachers by giving them freedom to use social media to engage with students and giving them the freedom to come-up with innovative ways of teaching using technology.
On the contrary, let’s talk about few practical ways on how many educators apply social media to flip the conventional teaching model and make classroom & home work experience meaningful to for the students.
YouTube
The average teacher impacts about 3,000 students in his or her lifetime. Imagine what could happen when you inspire 3,000 individuals or perhaps 300,000 students. How?
With Youtube!
Ask your students what they would prefer – Lectures of their teachers teaching them in the real classroom, or Videos of the same lectures on their computers, Macs, iPads or Smartphone devices. Like it or not – students would prefer their teachers more in a video than in person. Because they have better control on their lecture (and the teacher) when it’s a video. They can’t rewind a teacher 10 times in the classroom, they can’t pause the lecture in a real classroom to get a cup of coffee. It’s embarrassing for a student to interrupt a teacher in a real class and ask to repeat because he/she didn’t understand.
This brings us to the most fundamental problems with the conventional way of teaching – there is a ‘limit’ to the number of times a student can make a teacher repeat the lecture. Because of which – at the end of term, there is a half baked student with low grades advancing to the next level, in spite the intent to learn and master the topic.
While watching a teacher give lecture in a video on the other hand, student wouldn’t need to pretend that they have understood. They can go back and watch the lecture again in the comfort of their home.
If you as an institution are confident about the teaching skills of your teachers, you should record the lectures of your teachers and share it with the world with the help of Youtube.
…I give you a lecture [on cycling] ahead of time, and I give you a bicycle for two weeks, and then I come back after two weeks, and I say “Well, you’re having trouble taking left turns and you can’t quite stop. You’re an 80% bicyclist.” So I put a ‘C’ stamp on your forehead, and then I say, ‘Here’s a unicycle.’”
- Salman Khan, Khan Academy
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