Reflecting on Social Media in Learning

Course Reflection

In terms of integrating social media in the classroom, I have always been resistant to making the change. There is stigma sometimes associated with the use of any social media, especially in the classroom. I have been in many conversations with colleagues, about how “millennials are on that damn Twitter too much!” I suppose, as a newer educator, I was conforming to the same idea as my colleagues. Perhaps they felt threatened by having the attention taken off of them, or maybe they just don’t understand it. For me personally, I was afraid that I would lose the personal connection to my students.

The EDTECH program has helped me embrace technology integration in my classes. It has also helped me understand that I don’t have to, or even shouldn’t, integrate a piece of technology for the sake of just doing it. There must be specific purpose for introducing it and it should be for a meaningful purpose. I feel that social media is another tool that can be used in a meaningful way. In fact, throughout this course I have found that social media can be a very powerful tool in the instructor’s arsenal.

This course has introduced me to many popular social media platforms, some of which I was unfamiliar with and others that I finally realized their full potential. In our culminating project (Mini-Curricular Unit), I realized that you don’t have to use everything that is available in one class. You should try to meet the students where they are and choose platforms that interact seamlessly with each other. I am seeing that students these days are “masters of the hashtag”. By developing a hashtag that is specific to your topic or class, students can collaborate with one another but they can also discover other resources from different students, past and present, and also from around the world.  

As far as me integrating social media into my own practice, I can say that I already have. There are ideas in this course and platforms that I have found use in and have already integrated into my classes. I have developed hashtags for certain things that will help my students collect information and share (#NICscrub, #surgicalninja, etc.) I am planning to create a Facebook group, so that all of my students can share with each other. Finally, Diigo is one of the social media platforms that I was introduced to in this course. I see this as an extremely valuable tool for students studying surgical procedures and I plan to use this tool a lot. With the implementation of these tools, I think that I will be able to grow my connection to my students and put my fears to rest.

Blog Performance and Grade  

I enrolled in this course as an elective because I wanted to grow as an instructor and get over my resistance to social media. As you can tell from my past blog posts, blogging is not one of my strong areas. That being said, I feel that I have grown this semester in terms of social media and blogging. I started off slow in my blog but I feel that as time went on, I improved a lot. I think that the blogging process is important because it gives you a record of that growth and accomplishments. I do not feel that my blogging has been stellar but I feel that I have gained a better understanding of the blog and for that reason, I would give myself a 72/75 for blogging.