LSJ colleagues will know I’m doing a survey of how we all use social media in our teaching. I thought I’d start this survey via my blog.
Just us
This survey isn’t about how students use social media themselves. I know that in my production modules, for example, they mostly use Facebook for project management, scheduling meetings, etc.
And they use Twitter for finding sources and stories. I imagine this is true across the school.
It’s really about our using social media as a teaching aid.
What are we talking about here?
I’d think we need a fairly broad range. I’d want to know how we use:
- Blogs
- Google Drive (for writing and editing, collaboration, etc.)
- Social bookmarking services (Delicious, Diigo)
- Archive and read-later services (Evernote, Instapaper)
- Cloud servers (Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive)
- Multimedia services (YouTube, Soundcloud, Flickr)
And anything else you can think of that I’ve missed?
Owning up
And I’ll start off my admitting that, aside from blogging, I don’t use social media at all for teaching purposes. I don’t even tweet about my classes.
I already know I should be doing more, but I stuck to Blackboard this term.
This has obvious advantages for management and admin purposes (easy to contact students, set up groups, accept hand-ins, etc.).
But we all know its disadvantages: it’s not that intuitive, and while it’s fine for distributing basic documents (handbooks, etc.), it’s a bit clunky for things like sharing URLs, or quick notes.
Next term
I’m planning to set up Facebook groups for all my modules next term and next year, and to work more systematically with social bookmarking and archive services.
Any thoughts?
So … what’s everyone else doing, or planning to do?
