Using Social Online Networks in Teaching or Professional Development

The use of social media in education is becoming more prevalent.  It allows students to access useful information or resources, connect with learning groups, and gives them an opportunity to take part in a flipped classroom where they can benefit from online tutorials or workshops.

Descriptive: 
In my classroom last year, I used the social media platform of Twitter to engage my year 3/4 class in reading.  Each term a novel was allocated to be read to the class and each week activities were allocated to cover the chapters that were being read.  There was also the opportunity to create our own activities to show what learning the children gained from the text.

This was quite challenging at first.  Our school at that point did not allow children to skype and any social media was blocked.  This required getting permission to participate, letting the parents know what would be happening, and getting access to Twitter from school devices.  Another challenge was that the class of 24 children had access to six mini laptops and two classroom computers - collaborative learning would be required.  At this stage the school had wireless broadband running which could sometimes lag or not work so I was initially a little nervous.  The Twitter component happened each Friday between 10 and 11am and involved the children answering questions about the text and uploading activities they had completed.

A lot of skill teaching needed to take place before the first tweets went out and I admit I was very nervous as to what some may type!  We set up a system that all tweets needed to be approved by the teacher and this did work from week 1.

My main concern at the beginning of the experience was how this was going to fit around our traditional reading programme and how would it all be done in time for each Friday session!

Comparative

Before starting using Twitter and Chapter Chat, I researched exactly what was involved (device wise and input from children).  I followed some of the other classes and talked to some teachers who had been part of this social media learning in previous terms. 

The first two Chapter Chats were a steep learning curve - having 24 children tweeting simultaneously for an hour had me running off my feet - especially as each week at least one device would decide it didn't want to participate.  I was concerned that it would take over the learning of the normal reading programme as the activities for each week needed to be slotted into the timetable, as did the preparation for and participating in the weekly tweet sessions.

We also found that in the first week, the children found it difficult and time consuming to wait for the questions to come up on the twitter feed, to discuss the question, frame and answer and then type their tweet (reply).  There was also a lot of time spent practising typing skills and checking for grammatical errors.

Critical Reflection

After initially deciding to trial Chapter Chat for one term, our class become regulars - taking part for over 18 months and reading a lot of books together.  After my initial reservations, using this form of social media in my classroom provided only benefits for the children.  

• They became better typists
• They were more critical and caring of their published work
• Their reading comprehension improved - learning to read a question on a text, discuss possible answers and then formulate an answer they all agreed with as a full sentence
• Their enjoyment in reading grew - they loved to re-read the chapter chat text independently and there was always a queue to borrow it
• Reading a range of different authors opened their minds to these authors and they would source books by the same authors to read themselves - some sequels to the original texts and some stand alone texts.

I would certainly participate in this sort of learning again and would highly recommend any teacher taking part in Chapter Chat.