Importance of Social Media in Education

Social media is ubiquitous; it’s everywhere. It has been impacting every aspect of our lifestyle. It has changed the way we work, study, shop, eat and sleep. Students love using their Facebook accounts and checking out their Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram feeds to take a break and even escape from the drudgery of their study routines. But those who are tech savvy use social media in a constructive manner leveraging their learning potential, just like they authenticate assignments through such resources like plagiarism checker.

Here are some arguments on how using social media in different spheres of life can be important and useful:

Diversity of Ideas

Assignments no longer have to be traditional term papers and essays. Innovative teachers are experimenting with Instagram or Pinterest to give pictorial essay assignments to their students. Blogs are used as a platform to generate narrative style essays. Similarly, Twitter can help teachers give essay prompts, break complex course material into synthesized bites. Learners and their instructors can also use hashtags to organize ideas and information and retrieve them later on. However, no matter what content a learner is to produce, the apps like plagiarism checker online are still needed to complete each and every assignment. A free online plagiarism checker with percentage can help students, as well as the teacher, assure the authenticity of an assignment. For example, Copyscape is a helpful free online tool that can serve as a checker for unintentional plagiarism. While working on academic papers, one may find it useful to utilize Turnitin to be 100% sure that his or her work is original.

Broadening the Classroom Boundaries

Traditional classrooms are rigid in terms of structure, capacity, and access. On the other hand, social media give students opportunities to get linked and intermingle with teachers and learners irrespective of their geographic locations. Features like Facebook Live enable an instructor to deliver an online lecture, invite learners and interact with them in real time.

Easier Knowledge Generation and Sharing

The potential of online platforms like blogs and Facebook posts allows teachers to centralize study material and share it with an entire class in a quick and inexpensive way, which means faster and easier content curation, sharing and accessing the learning material and resources for students. Learners are also invited or encouraged to find and share any useful information they have come across with others. As opposed to the traditional form of learning, which encompasses knowledge shifting from the expert to the learners, knowledge generation through the online platform is more collaborative in nature.

Interactivity

The interactive users’ abilities like ‘comment’, ‘like’, ‘retweet’ and ‘share’ on these platforms help students in getting actively engaged with the learning process. Even the shyest one finds posting on social media comparatively easier than speaking in front of the whole class. Social Media helps students to push boundaries of their comfort zone and share their thoughts and ideas as well as develop the confidence to defend them in the face of criticism.

One must also mention a common observation and complaint from educationists and parents that social media tend to distract students from their studies and ultimately impact their grades or encourage them to complacently lift and share copy-pasted material. Frankly, the true potential and usefulness of a medium depend on the purpose it is used for and the way it is used. Teachers should encourage users to create original posts and tweets and run them through a plagiarism checker tool before hitting the submit button. Educators must realize that the learning process and assignments that are exciting and enjoyable create meaningful and authentic knowledge that students can remember beyond the classroom.