Social media used to follow and share
Facebook
Facebook is the world’s largest online social networking service. After registration, users* can create a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics. It’s possible to create school, class or project pages and manage them separately.
Getting started
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If you don’t have it already, create an account on www.facebook.com.
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Establish a private Facebook group for your class or a project and invite your students to this group You’ll see the option is available to you on the left side of the page.
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Share the content you want with your students.
Ideas for classroom implementation
Organise a class about a vegan lifestyle. Gather pros and cons for a vegan lifestyle by visiting the Facebook page of Cowspiracy and discuss the effects of eating meat and fish on the environment and the climate. As an introduction you can watch the trailer (or the whole documentary) of Cowspiracy on YouTube.. Also you can let your students watch this at home and discuss it in the class afterwards.
Subject:
Level: Senior
Duration:60 minutes
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Facebook has many interesting pages that are well worth a visit. You can use them to find information on a certain topic. On Facebook, facts, pictures and videos all come together so you mind fight an interesting video on a page that you could use as an introduction for your lesson or you can come across a funny comic that will trigger your students’ brains. Here are some interesting Facebook pages:-
I Fucking love science
News from Science
National Geographic
Nobel Prize
National Science Foundation (NSF)
EU Life Programme
Eco Schools
Facebook: Tips and tricks
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You might want to create a special teacher’s account when using Facebook to separate personal and business purposes.
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Check your privacy setting. By default everything is set to public. If you want to share content with a specified group you can alter your settings to i.e. ‘friends’.
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Beware: students are easily distracted.
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Do not add your students as friends on your personal Facebook account.
Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-charactermessages called "tweets". Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website or mobile device app. The biggest advantage of Twitter is that there is no need to become friends with someone before you can contact him or her. This makes first hand contact to (in theory) everybody in the world possible.
Getting started
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Share the content you want with your students by writing your first tweet
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Get your students to follow you by sharing your Twitter name with your students. They can then do a request to follow you.
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By default your account is set to public. Everyone can see your tweets. If you don’t want that then adjust your security and privacy settings.
How to integrate Twitter into your science lesson
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Teachers consult: Set up your own Twitter consulting hour where students can ask their questions about homework for example. Do this by establishing your own Twitter group and adding your students to that group.
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 10 - 30 minutes
- Recap! Let students recap what they learnt by having them write a summary tweet of max.140 digits. It enhances their analytical skills and their writing skills at the same time.
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 5 minutes
- Who said what on Twitter? Try to fuel up a discussion on a certain topic and let your students do a little research on Twitter on what others have said about this. Let them then adopt this opinion. Divide your class into two parts (1 supporting the idea, one opposing it).
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 30 minutes
Twitter: Tips & Tricks
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Almost every news source, science organisation, university etc. has their own Twitter account. Follow them to be up to date with the latest news.
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Check before you choose your hashtag i.e. #mass can be taken by many different sources already with very different purposes.
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Do not follow your students on Twitter. Keep school and private lives apart as much as you can.
Pinterest is a website that allows you to "pin" things online, just as you would pin them on a real life bulletin board. Furthermore, you can follow friends on Pinterest, "repin" interesting content or browse a live feed of items that are being pinned by others when you're searching for inspiration. What makes Pinterest unique is that it is super visual. Everything you look for is shown in clear images and/or video. Furthermore, Pinterest is becoming increasingly popular with more and more users. You can imagine this network is very resourceful.
Getting started
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Create some boards by clicking the + ‘create a board’ button. Give your board a name, e.g. inspiration science class, physics, chemistry, etc. Most of all, Pinterest is an online space where you can get inspiration. Need any ideas on your science class? Type i.e. ‘science class ideas’ in the search field at the top of the page and Pinterest will search content for you that others have pinned before.
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Found something interesting? Pin it to your own board. People that follow you will automatically see this.
How to integrate Pinterest into your science lesson
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Teachbytes offers a few suggestions: Whenever researching a topic, let your students create a board on Pinterest so they can pin relevant stuff on it. Create a board that is focused on scientists from a certain era. Then let your students each present their own board to the rest of the class so everyone can benefit from their presentations. This task can also be carried out in groups of course.
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 30 minutes
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Create a public board on a certain theme, such as the theme of plastic soup/microbeads and invite your students to add pins to this board. You could either use it as a means of gathering the pre knowledge that your students have or you could use it to gather new information on the issue.
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 30 minutes
Pinterest: Tips and tricks
- It is very easy to get lost in all the pins with Pinterest. It might be a good idea to limit the time for this part.
- Pinterest has the so called ‘pin it-button’ which you can download for your browser. This button allows you to pin content from anywhere on the Internet to your boards.
- When searching on pinterest try for example ‘citizen science’ and look for interesting ideas that you can carry out with your class.
Instagram
Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter.
Getting started
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Upload your photos and adjust the colours to your own preference by choosing one of the filters. The app will ask you to write a caption, which means a description, for your photo. You can also choose to tag people. You can only tag people that have an Instagram account. Click the checkmark when you’re done and upload your photo.
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Also your students need an Instagram account. If they don’t want to use their personal account you can ask them to create a second, students account. Or you can create a few student accounts and give the login details to your students. They can use the accounts when working in groups for example.
How to integrate Instagram into your science lesson
The community of weareteachers.com has some great ideas:
- Use photos to explain a scientific process. Record steps in a science experiment and post them online
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 5 minutes
- Watch as a plant unfurls or a chemical compound slowly changes colors - and keep the changes preserved on Instagram.
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 5 minutes
- Imagine how a famous scientist in history would use Instagram. Have students browse historical photos and create a bulletin board or poster display showing Einstein’s or Galilei’s Instagram feed.
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 30 minutes
- Go on a scavenger hunt. Challenge your students by uploading pictures of things they need to find. These things can be either found in nature or in the classroom. And when they found the object or phenomena let them post of picture of it to your account to prove it. After that you will post the second photo and so on.
Subject:
Level: Junior
Duration: 45 minutes
If you're considering using Instagram to deliver a class-based scavenger hunt, read the advice from this seasoned teacher.
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Design a list of items or clues.
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Create a public account for class use. Be sure to get a photo release from your students (and set rules for student images as well).
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Share the account name and hashtag with students. Have students use the hashtag on every image.
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Have students include additional information about the item when they upload it.
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Click the hashtag under any photo and see all the photos your students have posted.
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Instagram: Tips & Tricks
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When you want your post to be easily found by a wider public do use #hashtags for your post and put them in your ‘caption space’ For example you uploaded a picture of windmills and you want others to find this post you can ‘tag’ your photo like this: #windmills #airquality #sustainability.
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When you want to upload multiple pictures at once try using a photo collage app. You install this app on your phone and open it. You can then select how many pictures you want to add to your collage and simply add them. The app will create a collage and gives you the options to change the colours or shape of the picture and the frame.
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If you don’t want your posts marked as public you can also go to your settings and change your account status to ‘private’.
Edmodo
Edmodo is an online networking application for teachers and students in a safe and controlled environment appropriate for school. Edmodo is primarily a tool for within-class communication, but it also provides several ways for teachers to connect with other teachers.
Getting started
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Set up your first online classroom by clicking on the create group button. Fill out the details.
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Then add your students to the group. Adding students is super easy. Once you create a group, you will be given a unique group code to share with your students. Students can use the code to create their Edmodo account, and they will automatically be entered into that group.
How to integrate Edmodo into your science lesson
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Find out how science is taught across the world and give students the opportunity to not only learn about their own subject but also about another cultural view on that. Connect your classroom with another classroom in e.g. Germany via an Edmodo group.
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 20 minutes
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Use Edmodo to communicate with your students when you're out of the classroom or provide updates to students who are absent from class.
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 20 minutes
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Award a badge to a student that excelled in the task given. This is a nice digital motivator to keep up the good work. Click here to find out how to award a badge.
Subject:
Level: Junior & Senior
Duration: 5 minutes
Edmodo: Tips & Tricks
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The nice thing about Edmodo is that it’s a world wide community. This means you can get some community support from teachers all around the world. Type your question in here and teachers around the world will be able to read your request and help you.
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Post a quiz for students to take. You can attach links and files to each question. This allows you to post a document and ask students to read and respond to it. Quizzes can be in multiple choice, true/ false, fill in the blank or short answer form. You can allow students to see their scores immediately or you can disable that option.
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Use the Google Chrome extension or browser bookmark to quickly add content to your Edmodo library. Anytime you find something on the web, click the Edmodo extension or bookmark to save it in your Edmodo library.
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