Pros and Cons to Social Media in Education:There are many pros and many cons to using social media. Neither side is right or wrong, it is very opinion based. The pros to using social media is that students can have a classroom home page that they can go on to get information, they can connect to students and people from around the world, they can creatively share and create information, find out new information, collaborate with others to create something new, work on writing skills, and so on. The downsides to using social media in elementary classrooms is maturity, accountability, inappropriate content, distracting, become “addicted”, causing children to become “self-absorbed”, danger of cyberbullying, less face-to-face conversing, and so on. In my opinion, I think that elementary school aged children are too young to have social media. I can see the benefits to using it, but I feel like that would work better with older students. Elementary school children do not need to see the inappropriate content or talk to people around the world on their own. I think that they are too young to know the safety precautions when it comes to social media. I think social media is meant for middle aged and over, especially since the “legal” age to get any form of social media is 13 for security purposes. Plus, children in elementary school are still really young, needing face to face guidance, technology would just be taking away that time that they need to grow with others. I am not saying that social media is bad, but I believe that it is not good for elementary school aged children.
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Images Retrieved From: https://twitter.com/mscassidysclass
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Here is an example of a first grade classroom's twitter page. The purpose of this page primarily is for the teacher to share news and photos with the parents of the students and the other faculty of the school. It is almost like praising the students for their hard work. On this page, there is information about the class, where it is, who is the teacher, how to contact her, and a little biography. Scrolling through the classes feed, there was mostly pictures of students' artwork and their projects that she has posted. This is a great way to communicate with parents and show them the work their child is doing. This example is more for the teacher and the parents more than the students because the students are too young at this age to use social media. Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with parents.
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Images Retrieved From: https://www.pinterest.com/teachers/
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Here is an example of a teacher's Pinterest. Pinterest is a website designed for different fun ideas like crafts, recipes, clothing, and so on. What this teacher has done is go through and put different crafts according to grade level. This way the teacher knows where everything is and which crafts/activities are appropriate for each grade level. This is a page where students can follows if they wanted as well to do crafts and activities at home with their parents. This is a also a great way to get parents involved because it will show the parents the type of activities and crafts that they are doing in the classroom. This is a great place to get ideas, keep the children and parents involved, while also being able to be very organized and professional.
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