In the emerging digital world, education cannot stay behind. Social Media is a tool that can be used to improve the quality of your student’s learning in many ways. Using Social Media in your lessons will most likely enhance your student’s motivation. This is because Social Media already plays a big role in their everyday lives. By incorporating Social Media in your lessons, you connect with your students’ every day experience.

Benefits of using Social Media in your lessons

• Research on the topic of Social Media and learning has shown that people learn most effectively when they interact with other (similar) learners. This can be stimulated by using Social Media in your classroom and organising your students into virtual groups.

• Social Media could also be used in (digital) classrooms to share knowledge and ideas. Interesting video’s or presentations can be shared very easily with the whole class with just a few clicks.

• Furthermore, social media can offer students a platform to express one self. Sometimes in classrooms students can be a little shy and hold back from expressing their ideas when asked. Social Media can help these quiet students to find their voice and speak up.

• Students like to have an online space where they can ask questions and collaborate with teachers and students whenever they want. Social Media can help to create this online classroom.

Competencies

Implementing Social Media in your classroom can benefit a wide range of competencies, such as:

• Enhancing digital communication skills;
  
• Supporting creative thinking;
• Raising media awareness and the ability to see how media influences reality;
• Retrieving and processing large amounts of information ;
• Creating content that helps you to bring a message across to a wide audience