Robert Seidel Jr. and Kurt Weisenburger of Barrington (IL) High School offer some helpful tips. Here is a taste of their piece at Zocalo Public Square:
For most teachers, social media has no place in a classroom. When they do use it, they often retreat to or remain within the safer confines of “walled garden” discussion and message boards where everything can be monitored and tracked and kept isolated from the outside world. But since 2015, we’ve been training our Advanced Placement U.S. History students at Barrington High School, in Illinois, to step into the “Wild West” of the real internet.
As social studies teachers, our job is to help build informed, concerned citizens who participate in our society. In turn, we strive to cultivate and model appropriate behavior. For decades that only entailed the physical world, but times have changed. According to a 2018 study of teen social media habits, 95 percent of students have a smartphone, and 45 percent are online “almost constantly.” As teachers, we can choose to ignore social media because of its negative attributes or we can acknowledge that our students are using it and take responsibility to help them form healthy, intelligent, appropriate habits on it.
Incorporating social media into our lesson plans was something that began organically. Back in 2013, our district, Barrington 220, rolled out a 1:1 program to provide all students with a laptop or tablet to support their learning. In keeping with this initiative, we started sharing additional materials and articles on Twitter that supplemented our course content for interested students. Eventually, some industrious ones began to share and create content of their own, which, over time, led to a “back channel” discussion emerging on Twitter. We found that the students who were accessing and contributing to it on a regular basis were more tuned into our course and tended to perform better on assessments. When some of the quietest students in class found their voices via Twitter, too, we became convinced that we were really onto something; not only were we now often hearing from students we would not have heard from otherwise online, these more hesitant students were becoming comfortable enough to contribute more in class as well.
Once we decided this back channel was a useful aspect of our course, we began to create a more formal pedagogy around it, giving students the option to participate in class discussions in person or via Twitter by tweeting to the course hashtag #APUSH220 from a school-related Twitter account. The need to explicitly teach various elements of digital citizenship arose out of necessity from there.
Because we require students to tweet @ their source as a citation, and we encourage them to find and tweet @ the author, too, they become part of real-time conversations. Students’ tweets will occasionally bring journalists and historians into brief discussions with us—sometimes to answer a question or clarify a point, or sometimes simply to thank them for reading and sharing. Our students are always delighted to have the academic world acknowledge the work they’re doing, and we always appreciate professors and writers taking time to interact with our students.
Read the rest here.