Social Media in the Classroom: Valuable Tool or Distraction?

While many teachers may think that social media sites such as Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter are the bane of their existence, others are actively using these media channels to create – or at least complement – their lesson plans. If it's the way students feel comfortable expressing themselves today, it's better to use it than ignore it, or prohibit it, these educators feel.

As abstinence-only education – which was a broad failure in reducing teen sexual activity and may have even been responsible for a spike in teen pregnancy – has proved, flat-out prohibition rarely works.

Erin Olson, an English teacher in Sioux Rapids, Iowa, told the New York Times recently that social media, once anathema to teachers everywhere, can actually “entice students who rarely raise a hand to express themselves via a medium they find as natural as breathing.”

“When we have class discussions, I don’t really feel the need to speak up or anything,” said one of Olson's students, Justin Lansink, 17. “When you type something down, it’s a lot easier to say what I feel.”

During one exercise in Ms. Olson's classroom, several of her 11th graders read aloud from a poem called “To the Lady,” which ponders why bystanders do not intervene to stop injustice, others kept up a running commentary on their laptops, said the Times.

The poet “says that people cried out and tried but nothing was done,” one student typed onto a social networking site.

“She is giving raw proof,” another student offered, “that we are slaves to our society.”

For her part, Ms. Olson monitored the posts and fed them back into the classroom discussion.

While many students might be hesitant to speak up in the classroom, some are willing to contribute to what many teachers are referring to the “back channel,” or the concurrent digital media that can be built to lurk behind the main discussion.

While doubters fear that the use of these social media “back channels” are more of a distraction than a help, a small but growing number of teachers are electing to use them, with good success.

Others believe there are more appropriate back channel media than Twitter or Facebook: sites such as Google Moderator, which allows a class to propose and vote for the questions they would most like answered, or Today’s Meet, which allows educators to set up a virtual “room” online.

Some colleges, are even creating their own back channel media systems: Purdue University (News - Alert) has one called “Hot Seat.” It enables students to post comments and questions, which can be read on laptops or smartphones or projected onto a screen in the classroom. Sugato Chakravarty, who lectures about personal finance, stops lectures to answer those questions that have been “voted up” by students.

Before Hot Seat, “I could never get people to speak up,” Professor Chakravarty told the Times. “Everybody’s intimidated.”

“It’s clear to me,” he added, “that absent this kind of social media interaction, there are things students think about that normally they’d never say.”