The Undeniable Power at your finger tips!

Right off the bat I can without a doubt agree with the well placed quiz of Vicki Davis. The Quiz, while never explicitly referring to it, promotes the idea that social media is just a new form of communication in an ever updating world. Whenever something new begins there will without a doubt be new dangers and new unexpected consequences which could never have been foreseen. This has been true for many modern communication forms which are taken for granted in today’s technological lifestyle, such as the invention of the telephone, opening doorways for communication with possible strangers by simply dialing an incorrect number which can be done very easily. 

The scary part of this form of communication known as social media is its sheer power over so many aspects of life, be it the director of a company researching your interactions in order to determine who you are before you even get to an interview, or even a current employer keeping track of his/her employees to ensure they are not misrepresenting the company. Social Media’s power is only growing by the day and with the amount of information available to anyone willing to pay the possibilities seem endless for things to go wrong.

Social media does not however have to the enemy. The misconception that it will disrupt the learning process is too wide spread and needs to be redefined. Social media could prove to be an invaluable tool for educating the next generation in a way which is best suited for them. The fact that social media is so vast and we have no idea how far it can extend makes it a perfect platform for learning, where teachers can come up with new and innovative ways to use it in a way which benefits the learners as well as follows the required curriculum.

As a new age educator many of us need to understand that social media is not just a name …

We need to unpack what it really is, a social form of media, we need to understand what this means and that we should not allow ourselves to be constrained by what we are told, but to learn things for ourselves such as how to work with it and not treat it as a distraction. 

Nicholas Provenzano was able to actively include multiple forms of social media in his teaching process not only as a means of keeping the students up to date with their work but also giving them the opportunity to learn more outside the classroom and expand their learning beyond textbooks and exam papers. He also mentions how he has used but a fraction of the social media tools available, if this was possible and successful for one educator, why then would it not be possible for others. 

All it takes is a bit of effort on behalf of the educator, in understanding how to involve the social media correctly and not allowing it to become a distraction.