By Lynn Zimmerman
Associate Editor
Editor, Teacher Education
When I arrived in Albania to teach future English teachers at a university, I wanted to use online resources to stay connected with my students like I do in the US. After trying several different free learning management platforms, I decided to set us up on FaceBook. Most of my students already have FaceBook accounts, and they were used to using it. Although things did not work exactly as I had planned, it did form a basis for online communication among the students and with me.
My intention was that “our” FaceBook page would be a place for English-only communication about issues related to English and English teaching. I linked to the American English website and the British Council so we’d get their feeds. I asked the students to do the same when they find relevant links.
What actually has happened is that the site has functioned primarily as a social networking page for the students with daily posts of selfies and a lot of comments in Albanian. At first, I was upset by this because it did not meet my expectations. However, as time has gone by, I have accepted the social aspect of this and how it has created a sense of community among the students in a different way. I do use it to post class-related information and to link to “professional” resources, and they do occasionally post in English. However, the next time I do something like this with a group of students, I want to try to create more of a learning environment.
Eryk Bagshaw’s article “Social media is teaching the world English“1 about using social media to offer “snack-size” English language lessons gave me some ideas about how to do this. This Australian initiative has found that users respond positively when offered small bits of English – a few idioms, a few uses of modal verbs, difficult spellings, etc. Bagshaw says, “It is all about giving people context to hang that learned language on.” He also wrote about how the BBC uses Twitter to connect English learning and current events and mentioned that creating a community is a part of the service and part of the appeal of using social media in this way. “You can get instant feedback from other users a world away, they collaborate, correct, rework. That is how you learn and that is really exciting.”
As a teacher, I recognize the importance of building community among learners. Therefore, I intend to take what I learned from my experience in Albania and what I learned from Bagshaw’s article and think about how I can change my expectations about social media use for a group of students so that it functions as a more effective learning tool, as well as for community-building .
I would like to hear others experiences with using social media in learning environments. What has worked? What hasn’t?
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1Sydney Morning Herald, 26 June 2015.
Filed under: Facebook, International, Language Learning, Social Media, Twitter |
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Lynn, thanks for this timely article on social media in teaching/learning English. The links to the various sites are invaluable. Your discussion on the broader social role of SM is thought-provoking. I’ve been using Twitter with my classes (all are online) but more as a one-way broadcasting medium than as a multi-way social platform. I tweet deadline reminders as well as choice quotes from student forums. I sometimes tweet shoutouts for outstanding performances. Students can follow the tweets or read them in the sidebar of our course blogs. They add another dimension to the array of media that make up an online course. I really like the idea of distributing information in snack-size portions to make it more palatable. I’m now thinking of ways to incorporate these bite-size chunks of information into my courses. I’ll probably do it via tweets. Maybe as enticing questions/statements that link to short answers/explanations? Or tips? Seems a lot more attractive than huge chunks of readings.