Week 6.0 “My Dog ate my Homework!” — an excuse that could be no more
This week’s assignment is for each of us to feature one social media tool that could be used in classrooms teaching. I selected Instagram as my spotlight tool as I feel that often times the easier/wide spread the tools are, the higher the possibility of users to using it effectively and frequently.
This assignment was great in terms of learning what tools are out there and gaining knowledge about how these tools can be incorporated in teaching and training through peers’ individual experiences with the tools. One of the greatest challenges for me in this class is I feel that since I am not in the teaching field, there are limited opportunities for me to utilize and try the tools we have learnt in class in an educational setting. However by reading other students’ posts, I am able to not only expand my knowledge about the tools available, but also getting new ideas on what ways we could use these tools and with what kind of audience do they work best. That is one of the benefits in online collaborative learning. We can work with our peers and navigate our way through the overwhelming amount of information on the web, and reduce our information screening time to find the right information.
Interestingly, one of the common finding I can see in each person’s report is that they find it easier to monitor and follow up with their students’ progress through the use of these social media tools (SMT), as they help to eliminate the location and time constraint of getting things done within limited time and space. Students are able to work on their project whenever and wherever, teachers can monitor and correct students’ assignment whenever and wherever. This is especially effectively with group work. The fact that the projects are saved online with the post time recorded means that no one can say “MY DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK!” or “I forgot my homework at home…”. This allows teachers to identify individual students that may need additional help, and monitor each student’s contribution to group projects and make fair evaluations to individuals performance, which used to be (probably still is) a huge problem with group work in higher education settings. But more importantly, I can really see how these tools can enhance students’ engagement and participation in their own learning experience, and at the same time learn to better teamwork while getting used to new technologies.
Last but not least, I also found this week’s reading very interesting, in particular, our very own Dr. Hoffman’s (2009) paper “Social Media and Learning Environments: Shifting Perspectives on the Locus of Control”. Having worked in the educational field in different levels across various countries for a few years, it is not difficult to notice that at times policies and one size fits all structures often hinders the adoption and implementation of new ideas, even if they pose to be beneficial to the cause. Utilizing social media and online platforms in education is inevitable with the world becoming a smaller place by the day through globalization. As quoted in Dr. Hoffman’s paper:
Higher education will face a challenge: when learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalizable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for? (Weller, 2009, p. 184)
In order to narrow the gap between consumer (students) expectations and product supplied (education) to stay relevant in the education market, it is imperative for administration to actively re-evaluate their strategies in consideration of embracing the use of new social media tools to address long term educational change.
References:
Weller, M. (2009). Using learning environments as a metaphor for educational change. On the Horizon, 17(3), 181–189. doi: 10.1108/10748120910993204
Hoffman, E. S. (2009). Social media and learning environments: Shifting perspectives on the locus of control.Education, 15(2), 23–38. Retrieved from http://ineducation.couros.ca/index.php/ineducation/article/view/54/533
