Online Etiquette in Education

Earlier this week, I was working on an assignment for my EDP 279 class. The topic of this assignment was Online Etiquette and as a class, we had to create a list of rules for online communication within education.

When I was thinking about what I wanted to contribute to the list my class was creating, I was also reading through my classmates’ responses and I feel that they brought up some excellent points.

Screenshot I took of a blog I made my freshman year of
high school for my science class.

I finally settled on contributing to the rules about social media in the classroom. In my EDT 246 class last semester, I had a group project centered on the use of social media in the classroom, so I was already somewhat familiar with how social media could be implemented. However, I still found myself uneasy about whether or not it should be used, so I thought I’d explore the topic a little more in depth. I started to ponder:

As a teacher, would I ever use social media in my future classroom? To answer this question, I found myself coming up with more questions.

Before I knew it, I had a list of 10 or 15 questions typed on my computer. As I went through the list, I noticed that my questions were becoming more and more complex.

I looked at my list and realized that this is even more of a multifaceted issue than I had originally thought. Social media can definitely have some benefits, but to actually reap those benefits, social media has to be implemented correctly, which is a feat in its own right.

Before I added my post to the thread my classmates had started, I narrowed down my list to 3 or so central questions. These questions were centered around whether or not students would be using their personal accounts, whether we, as teachers, would use our personal accounts, how the sites would be used, and if we should mix social media sites, that are often perceived as a distraction, with schoolwork.

After I typed these questions, I also posed another question to my classmates: would social media add or detract to the classroom environment?

When I was typing my response, I found myself thinking about my experiences in high school and college. I’ve never had a teacher or professor use Twitter or Facebook, but I’ve heard about some who have used Twitter.

Typically, those professors and teachers who use Twitter will have students respond to a question using a certain hashtag and their responses will be graded. My personal issue with this is that on Twitter, there are only 140 characters. Depending on the question, that limit wouldn’t be sufficient and I feel like this would be difficult to not only monitor, but also to grade. It would be hard to create a rubric for a 140 character response.

I’ve also heard of teachers and professors who use Twitter to remind students about homework and due dates. As for this side of the social media debate, there still comes the issue of whether or not personal accounts would be used.

So for now, despite the benefits that social media sites could have, I think the best routes to implement any type of social media in the classroom are to have a class website where homework is posted, or to even have students create a blog. These blogs can then serve as discussion boards for students.

This is a debate that seems never ending and I’ll be interested to see if, and to what degree, social media is used in schools once I start my field placements next year.