Inquiry

My Inquiry Question:

How can educators use social media to mobilize, personalize and contextualize the learning of their students?

As the dawn of a new curriculum is upon us, many teachers can’t help but feel concerned/intimidated by the emphasis that the new BC Ed. plan is placing on personalized learning. Many still feel that the current system does not support the individualized attention needed in order to give students a personalized learning experience. When faced with class sizes pushing 30, it’s no wonder why many teachers are still skeptics.

So what can we do about this? How are we going to adapt and make this idea a reality? Adapt being the key word here. The answer may be at our fingertips … literally. In this modern day, teachers have some of the most sophisticated educational resources at their disposal; I’m talking about social media and mobile learning. Although its critics may be numerous, this “informal” strategy may be just the right one to get the job done.

The participatory aspect of social media helps to facilitate mobile collaboration and interaction amongst students and teachers. It promotes student choice and allows them to customize their learning. Social media also creates a space for students to co-construct a shared-learning framework, in which they are all participating content-generators. Education, as it stands right now, is a very individual process, and perhaps it’s time to take a more social and inclusive approach to learning. Social media facilitates the inclusion of students’ outside interests into the formal classroom, thereby creating a more authentic and contextualized environment and closing the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning.   


In short, social media is here to stay. The traditional wood and brick classroom is making way for the new global classroom; learning need not be constricted to a building or an institution. Rather, it is continuous and organic, things which are complemented by the connectivity, mobility, and collaborative ability of social media. As this new era of education approaches, we should not be feeling solely responsible for individualizing the learning of each of our students, but rather, we should be providing them choice and the tools to do it themselves.

Please read the articles in my blog for more information on this topic. Let's all work together to make social media work for us!