This document discusses the use of various social media tools for educational purposes. It begins by introducing popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. It then discusses how social media has become integrated into students' lives and can be leveraged for learning activities. The document provides details on how each platform works and their specific features. It explores how these tools can be used in teacher education by facilitating communication, collaboration and professional development opportunities for student teachers. Overall, the document argues that social media has potential to enhance learning if used purposefully and that teachers require training to optimize use of these platforms for educational goals.

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UNIT 5
SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS FOR TEACHERS AND LEARNERS
Social Media Tools: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
The Social Media Visionaries….
 Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg (2004)
 Twitter - Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams (2006)
 Linkedin - Reid Hoffman (2002)
 Instagram - Kevin Systrom (2018)
 YouTube - Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim (2005)
Background
 Technology more than an enabler in education.
 Students like to use smart phones, tablet, laptop etc.,
 Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, you tube, Blogs, Wikis are the new tools for networking
and knowledge sourcing and sharing.
 Wi-Fi campuses are the new infrastructural benefits, educational campuses provide.
 Learning innovation, faster replication through virtual medium are the causes for fast
dissemination of knowledge.
The Importance of Social Learning
 90% of college students visit social networking sites on a regular basis
 Social learning is learners learning from each other
 Today's students want to document their feelings and insights in a highly timely manner
 Social learning can increase comprehension of material and create new channels for
students to learn.

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Social Media – Meaning and Definition
Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate
in social networking.
- Oxford Dictionary (2010)
Social media are web 2.0 applications. It allows user to interact, collaborate in social
media. Web 2.0 also allow to create user generated content in a virtual community.
Do not just use social media for the sake of it!
 We’re going to spend just a short amount of time explaining the tool and focus more
on ways to use them for learning activities. If you want help on the technical aspects,
please set up a one-on-one training.
 The learning objective is most important. Social media is a tool to help teach a concept
so is sure to not lose sight of the learning for the cool factor.
 Choose 1 tool to start and make it purposeful.
Social Media
Social media is the grouping of individuals into specific groups like small rural
communities (or) a neighbourhood subdivision. Although social media is possible in person,
especially in the workplace, universities and high schools, it is most popular online. The
Internet is filled with millions of individuals who are looking to meet like-minded people and
share first-hand information and experiences about education, cooking, golfing, gardening,
developing friendships, professional alliances, finding employment, business-to-business
marketing, and even groups sharing information about backings cooks to the thrive movement.
The topics and interest are as varied and rich as the story of our universe.
Social media refers collectively to all media technologies, including the internet and
computer, which are used for communication. Social media has become a valuable source for
development, communication, entertainment, companionship, and adventure. It is bound to
affect profoundly almost all human activities including education, industry, governance,
personal lives, and social lives around the world. Media has become an essential part of life;
people are spending their time on new technologies like internet, cell phones and computers to

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stay in touch with world events and entertainment. Social media has come to play a
fundamental role in modern society. The five main functions of media are influencing,
educating, informing, entertaining and providing market for goods and services. Social media
is very important in the fast moving world because without media society would be unaware
of local and foreign affairs.
When it comes to online social media, websites are used. Social media websites
function like an online community of internet users. Depending on the websites in question,
many of these online community members share common interests in education, profession,
hobbies, religion, politics and alternative life styles. Once a person is granted access to a social
media website he or she can begin to socialize. This socialization may include reading the
profile pages of other members and possibly even contacting them.
Social Media Tools
There are so many basic popular social media tools available. They are;
i) Facebook
ii) LinkedIn
iii) Twitter
iv) Instagram
v) YouTube
i) Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004
operated and privately owned by facebook. inc. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo
Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes in the United States. As of February 2012,
Facebook has more than 845 million active users. People use it to share information and keep
in touch with friends. For teachers, Facebook is an easy way of communicating with students
without the need for travel. Its main features are as follows;
Profile: It has personal information the user chooses to share with friends and students.
Friend Search: It helps to find friends and students on Facebook and add them to the
user's contracts.

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Wall: It is the place where the user can update their status, share photos, and videos and
post links for their friends and students to see. Students can also post updates and share
information on the user's wall.
News Feed (home page): It gives the user an updated list of one of our students'
activities. One can also update their status and share things with friends and students.
Message: It helps to send private messages to the user's friends and students.
Chat: It helps to send real-time instant messages to friends and students who are online
via the chat function on each page.
Facebook in Teacher Education
Social network sites such as Facebook provide several possibilities for socialization of
individuals, ability to communicate with people living worldwide, ability to be a member of a
group which cannot be possible in real life due to geographical and physical constraints, self-
expression, and ability to receive information and share it. Utilizing Facebook effectively in
teacher education courses will help facilitate prospective teachers to model what they have
learned in their own classrooms. Teacher education students will not only benefit from the
classroom advantages of using Facebook but also by learning professional Facebook etiquette.
Social networking tools and applications can be used to facilitate the teaching and learning
process which includes collaborative, communicative, documentaries, generative and
interactive tools. It is being used to keep up to date and in touch with existing friends and
relations, or to create new relationships.
In India, there are various policies and reports which emphasize better school education
through training of teachers towards the path of ICT. Flexibility, professional development,
academic support, universal access, participatory forums, communities, interest groups, keep
teachers in touch, self-directed learning, reflective learning, articulate new ideas, being self-
critical, and work collaboratively, all are the abilities recommended for an ICT enabled and
trained teachers in India.
The curricular areas of initial teacher education are recommended in NCTE (2009) as
to develop habits and the capacity for self-directed learning, have time to think, reflect,
assimilate and articulate new ideas; be self-critical, and work collaboratively in groups. With
the millions and millions of users on Facebook, its popularity among college-age students is

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undeniable, but the potential for this technology to positively impact student and teacher
learning remains in question. In response to these concerns, this study has chosen to focus on
the student teachers’ and teacher educators’ perception regarding the potential of Facebook in
education with the dimensions of Facebook as a communication and collaboration tool in
education, its positive roles in teacher education program,s and potential use in classroom
settings.
Social networking sites are becoming more involved in our daily life day by day. As of
today, instructors or stakeholders can neither conduct a course completely through Facebook
nor can they ignore this development comfortably. So, on the basis of the findings of the present
project, it can be concluded that there should be capacity building and training programs in
teacher education so that the popularity and potential of social network site could be utilized
productively by making it a powerful cognitive tool if adapted for academic pursuits and career
goals. For example, colleges and universities could take advantage of the new ways that
students are communicating with one another.
Websites could be established where student teachers could interact on an academically
focused network site, with student teachers posting on walls and teacher educators joining in
on these discussions. Social network sites can be integrated into preservice teacher training
successfully as an optional subject but can also be integrated as a compulsory subject. The
successful use of social network sites for class depends to a large extent on the personal
commitment of the faculty members, and this may require quite some time investment,
depending on the way in which these sites are used. Teacher educators in particular need to
develop strategies to make optimal use of the potential in education. Due to time restrictions
during the teaching practice session of pre-service teacher education courses, social network
sites should be used to share and follow each other’s experiences and get solutions of their
problems related to teaching practice by classmates and teacher education.
In addition, alumnae could visit these sites to help current student teachers find
appropriate internships, job placements, and information about postgraduate academic and job
experiences. These kinds of experiences might be engaging for student teachers and open new
ways of academically-oriented interactions where teacher educators and alumnae could
discover more about the student teachers' interests, and student teachers, in turn, might express
and develop more intellectual facets of their lives. In the present project, the attempt has been
made to study student teachers’ and teacher educators’ potential of Facebook use in teacher

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education, but the researcher, after completion of this project, had felt the field of research that
has been chosen is extremely vast and there remains a great deal in the area to be explored.
The social network sites in education are an emerging and fresh area that is unexplored
in India. This area of research is very fertile in nature and has a lot of scopes to be probed.
Overall, the implications of social network sites for education, in particular teacher education
courses, can only be good, as student teachers and teacher educators stand a better chance of
interacting with peers/colleagues, teachers/students, and content as well. The positive point is
that it allows not merely the observational media, but the interactive media also.
ii) LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional’s related social networking site. Founded in December 2002
and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. The web is filled
with social networks for educators. For many faculty members and administrators, though,
LinkedIn can be the go-to one-stop-shop for professional interactions online. The site’s purpose
is fairly straightforward, but in the world of academics where everyone has a public online
presence and needs to be properly curated, just setting up a profile can be intimidating.
Fortunately, LinkedIn has some of the best social network privacy options out there, as well as
a lot to offer those working in colleges or schools. Here are seven easy ways that one can make
the service work for them as an administrator or instructor.
1. Finding Jobs: This is the obvious one. LinkedIn first and foremost is a public résumé that is
easily findable via Google or LinkedIn’s built-in search engine for employers looking for
potential hires. The Jobs menu on LinkedIn also has a handy set of tools for educators looking
for jobs, though, including searchable postings and a premium paid service to make one more
visible to the right people.

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2. Consult Experts: Since LinkedIn users are searchable via name, position, and institution,
seeking out new potential contacts and reaching out to them with questions about the
experience about curriculum or lesson topics can be a breeze.
3. Connect with Old Colleagues: Did one fail to stay in touch with a teacher from the first
school they worked at? Did a coworker admired but lost touch with go on to grab an
administration job out of state? Looks them up and reconnect. One never knows what might
happen.
4. Get Recommendations: LinkedIn streamlined the age-old process of soliciting letters of
recommendation by letting you issue and request personal statements from our colleagues.
Think of them as added credibility that prospective employers can look at and consider when
they start searching the web for reasons to hire one.
5. Form Discussion Groups about Departments and Policies: LinkedIn’s systems for setting up
groups are wonderful. Each one can be public or private and hosts a space for ongoing
discussion threads.
6. Keep an Accurate Contact List: Like Facebook, LinkedIn can be an invaluable tool for
keeping track of one social network's members as they move between zip codes, workplaces,
and even industries. The network also brings a messaging platform that doesn't require one to
update addresses and numbers.
7. Promote our Own Blog or Other Extracurricular Project: Students aren't the only ones with
after-school activities to worry about. If one has a research project, blog, or side venture that
one thinks might interest others in our field, LinkedIn can be a great place to get feedback and
let our colleagues know what they have been doing outside of the classroom.

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iii) Twitter
Twitter is an online popular social networking tool and micro blogging service that
enables its users to send and read text based posts of up to 140 characters, known as tweets. It
was created by Jack Dorsey in March 2006 and launched in July. The service rapidly gained
worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million
tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as the SMS
of the Internet.
These tweets are then published online and can be publicly viewed. Twitter users can
post their own tweets, follow the tweets of other users and contribute to a wider online
discussion based on a particular topic or event. Twitter allows one to share their thoughts,
participate in discussions and engage with other people based on their interests. It also allows
one to keep up-to-date with people, organizations and developments. Its main features are as
follows:
1. Tweet: A message sent on Twitter that is up to 140 characters in length.
2. Followers: People who have subscribed to their tweets.
3. Hashtag (#): This allows one to tweet on a popular Twitter topic by including the '#'
symbol at the beginning of a word, such as '#weather'.
4. Retweet (RT): Forwarding another user's tweet to one’s followers.
Twitter in Academia
Twitter has several unique characteristics and features that have made it one of the
fastest growing web 2.0 tools in social networking. Twitter has the potential to enhance
learning and motivate students to engage in the learning process when used to supplement
instruction in educational settings. Maddrell (2010) identifies three major characteristics of
twitter, communication, interaction and motivation to participate and their distinct features. For
the nature of communication, Maddrell identifies always on or always accessible, broadcast
messages and conversations and shared interest communications as main features of twitter.
For the nature of interactions, Maddrell identifies network ties, transparency, and audience
awareness as the main features of twitter. For motivations to participate, Maddrell identifies
access and reciprocity as the main features of twitter.

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The twitter has several advantages when integrated effectively as a social networking
tool and also in educational settings. All the planning level, educators can use twitter to
collaborate to plan, develop and implement lessons and projects. Use of twitter builds network
around a common theme.
Academic use of twitter will continue to expand as more students and teachers embrace
its use in teaching and learning. In addition to the uses to twitter in academia discussed by
Ramsden and Jardan, Parry (2008) identifies thirteen other ways to use twitter is academia:
 Class chatter: this activity is educational and non-educational conversations that
students engaged in inside and outside of the class. This activity extends the walls of
the classroom beyond the structured meeting place and time. It keeps students
connected all the time.
 Classroom community: students develop a sense of oneness as a result of twittering
as part of a class. This sense of community engages student is meaningful activities
across academic and non-activities beyond the structured walls of the classroom and
class time.
 Get a sense of the world: getting students to look at the public timeline of twitter,
http://twitter.com/public_timeline, where all public messages get posted gives them an
opportunity to view thing globally. Though the noise ratio here in pretty high, it
provides them with a sense of variation around the world on issues they may be dealing
with or are interested in participation could be active or as a passive spectator.
 Track a world: track a word allows students to subscribe to posts which contain the
word. This active could be used to search for information or just to understand the
appropriateness of use of the world.
 Tracking: twitter can be used to track activities of international, national state, and
local activities of groups, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, businesses
and governmental activities or agencies.
 Instant feedback: the always, on feature and easy access on phones make it easy to
get instant feedback from participants. This feature could make twitter both appealing
and engaging for some students, but on the other hand overwhelming for others.
 Follow a professional or organization: students can follow someone else who is on
twitter, who interests them or an organization to track their activities.

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 Follow a famous person: many celebrities, educationist, politicians and other news
makers on a twitter. Students can follow the activities of these individual on twitter as
part of class activities and write about knowledge gained or their experiences following
the person virtually.
 Grammar: Twitter is good for teaching grammar. Because of its short form those who
tweet often abbreviate and abuse grammar rules, developing their own unique twitter
rules. This helps to demonstrate; both how all communication needs rules or structure
and how important something like a comma or a period can be. (some tweets become
really ambiguous really ambiguous because of their lack of punctuation) twitter forces
users to be succinct and specific in their tweets.
 Rule Based writing: related to the above is the idea that when one changes the rules
(context) around any written communication one necessarily change the content of such
an utterance. Rules rather than hindering communication can actually be really
productive. Because twitter limits communication to 140 characters, it is surprising
what develops out of this limit, and how quickly one starts to think in messages of 140
characters.
 Maximizing the teachable moment: it is often hard to teach in context, twitter
promotes teachable moments from all participants. Since all participants have access to
every tweet teachable moments from any participant happen frequently, especially
when inappropriate or controversial tweets are posted. These moments do help to shape
the structure of the class.
 Public notepad: twitter is really good for sharing short inspirations, thoughts that just
popped into our head. It is recorded; it can be viewed any time to get inspiration from
others. This is really useful for any creative based class.
 Writing assignments: twitter promotes sequential writing activities or assignments.
This activity allows different students to add on to existing tweets to build a story, a
concept or an idea.
Students see twitter as a quick and efficient manner of sharing information with peers.
The research also shows that when twitter is used for reflections students gained insight on the
thoughts processes of others, an opportunity they would not regularly get with pen and paper
reflections.

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There are several shortcomings to using twitter in education settings as is the case with
all technologies integrated in an educational setting. The nature to twitter by nature limits users
to only 140 characters per tweet or message. This forces users to condense their thought process
to present information in a clear and succinct manner. Students who used twitter prior to use in
their study were more receptive to it than students who were exposed to the technology for the
first time in study. Students who used it for the first time were frustrated with the tool and
overwhelmed with material presented. Other factors that may affect effective integration of
twitter in educational settings are teachers’ lack of knowledge of twitter, training and
experience using twitter, teachers’ attitudes toward technology integrating in general, access to
hardware with network capabilities for student and teachers inside and outside the educational
setting.
Twitter Integration in the Teacher Education
Twitter as an educational tool has the potential to transform and enhance twenty first
century teaching and learning by providing students with the opportunity to engage in fun,
creative and interactive lessons. To integrate twitter as an educational tool, the purposes of
using twitter should be clearly outlined, defined, aligned with the curriculum and structured for
it to have a meaningful impact on students learning. Twitter should not be integrated for the
sake of integration without a clear educational value. The use of twitter was not all positive. It
was clear that first time users had difficultly using two and questioned the educational
significance of the tool addition; students were overwhelmed with the volume information
generated via twitter.
Twitter is recommended its before integrating twitter as an educational tool, study
should be trained to ensure a comfort level that work enhance the educational process and not
detract from due to logistical issues and students comfort level with the application. Also
teachers need to prepare students, how to analyze tweets received to ensure that they are to
filter through the information to gain educational value. Web 2 tools like twitter continue to be
more accessible to provide avenues for educators to reach students inside and outside of the
traditional classroom.

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iv) INSTAGRAM
Classroom Ideas
10 Surprising Ways to Use Instagram in the Classroom
Move over, Facebook! If you teach middle or high schoolers, you know that Instagram
is one of the most popular social media channels for teens and tweens today. And while it may
not seem like it at first, there are […]
Move over, Facebook! If you teach middle or high schoolers, you know that Instagram
is one of the most popular social media channels for teens and tweens today. And while it may
not seem like it at first, there are many applications for Instagram in the classroom.
Of course, it’s important to protect students’ privacy, especially when using a public
channel like Instagram. If you’re interested in trying any of the ideas below, we recommend
creating a classroom account that you set to “private” and carefully vetting any potential
followers. You might also try adapting our suggestions to an educational social media platform
such as Edmodo. Finally, be sure to check your school’s technology policies before you begin.
10 awesome ways you can use Instagram in the classroom.
1. Showcase students’ work. Snap pictures of students’ artwork and other special projects to
share on a private Instagram account only accessible to families and others in your school
community.
2. Feature a student of the week. Invite students to alternate “taking over” your classroom
Instagram account and sharing photos from their daily lives. Then have the featured student
share his or her photos with the class.
3. Capture field trip memories. Invite a student volunteer “archivist” to take photos on your
field trips or during class parties and share them on your Instagram account.
4. Imagine how a famous person in history would use Instagram. Have students browse
historical photos and create a bulletin board or poster display showing Abraham Lincoln’s
or Buzz Aldrin’s Instagram feed.
5. Imagine what a favorite character would post. Challenge students to find photos that
would appear in Harry Potter’s or Katniss Everdeen’s Instagram.

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6. Share reading recommendations. Invite students to snap photos of their favorite books
and then browse the photos in your feed for more ideas on what to read.
7. Record steps in a science experiment. Watch as a plant unfurls or a chemical compound
slowly changes colors—and keep the changes preserved on Instagram.
8. Go on an ABC scavenger hunt. Challenge kids to find print in the world around them—
on signs, packaging and in the mail.
9. Discover ideas for writing. Tap an “inspiration fairy” to take 10 photos that could serve as
a prompt for writing—an empty bird’s nest, a for Sale sign and a broken doll, for instance.
10. Document student progress. Snap photos of student’s writing at the beginning and end of
the year. Order inexpensive prints from sites such as Prinstagr.am to show students how far
they have come!
The Role of Instagram for Students in the Online Classroom
When people think of Instagram in the classroom they typically think of problems
students have goofing off on social media and sharing pictures and video when they should be
paying attention to what the teacher is talking about. When it comes to online learning and the
digital classroom though, Instagram might be a useful tool instead of a useless distraction.
Instagram and the Online Classroom
For those of you not familiar with Instagram as a service, it’s a social media platform
that specializes in sharing pictures and video both among Instagram users and within other
social media platforms. For those whose entire classroom experience takes place over the
Internet, the ability to quickly share images and video with classmates can be a necessity.
Instructors may also find the video-sharing capabilities of Instagram to be beneficial for making
announcements and for getting lectures into a student’s news feed.
The real power of Instagram isn’t the speed with which this media can be shared though;
it’s that Instagram posts across different platforms. This means that someone can post an image
or video once, and it will shoot across several different social media websites. This can be
extremely useful for teachers, or for group projects when someone wants to make sure everyone
sees an update, but that person doesn’t want to post and re-post the same content a dozen times.
Any technology that allows for faster, more streamlined communication across great
distances is going to find a use in the online classroom. The key to Instagram is to use it to

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enhance the learning experience. For more information about social media and its place in the
online classroom simply contact us today!
v) YouTube
Launched in 2005, YouTube is the world’s most popular video-sharing website that
lets anyone upload short videos for private or public viewing. The massive growth in social
media over the past decade or so has been hugely influential on the teaching profession.
Channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and youtube have quickly become very popular in the
classroom. Using these social networking sites may be an excellent way to engage students in
their education. A teacher taking video notes and then posting them on YouTube for the class.
Because technology is an integral part of our daily life, students experience similar stimulation
in the classroom. Using video clips or media students learn effectively by understanding the
concepts.
YouTube contains a mix of personal and professional videos that entertain, inform and
spark discussion, from home videos to class videos, trailers, and advertisements. Watching and
sharing one’s favorite videos on YouTube with students, family and friends have become a
popular talking point and source of education and entertainment. Uploading videos to YouTube
is an opportunity to share one’s own thoughts and ideas. Its main features and given below:
1. Watch videos: View videos for free on YouTube from all over the world.
Share videos: Upload one's own video. YouTube videos can be easily shared by posting video
links on other sites such as Facebook and Twitter. By looking at the video clips, they can
remind of what the teacher spoke about in class reinforces the material into students’ memory.
Some of the useful YouTube websites are;
1. School tube is a website dedicated to the sharing of videos created by students and teachers.
School tube allows teachers and schools to create their own channels for sharing their students’
works. School tube also provides excellent how-to resources, copyright-friendly media, and
lesson plans for using video in the classroom.
2. Teacher tube has been around for a while now but still runs into teachers who have not heard
of it. Teacher tube provides user-generated videos for teachers by teachers. Many of the videos
on Teacher tube have teachers sharing lesson plans in action. Some videos on Teacher tube are
simply inspirational. And other videos don’t have teachers or students in them but contain

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educational lessons nonetheless.
3. Teachers.tv is a UK–based website with videos for teachers and about teaching. Teachers.tv
provides hundreds of videos available for free download. On teachers.tv there are videos for
all grade levels and content areas. Teachers.tv also has videos about teaching methods and
practices.
4. Free Video Lectures is a library of more than 18,000 video lectures from more than 700
courses offered by some of the world’s top colleges and universities. The library of videos can
be searched by subject and or university. The video sources are a mix of YouTube and other
providers. Many of the videos are available for free download.
5. Math A Tube is a complication of videos from a variety of users and other websites. Videos
are categorized by mathematics topics and subtopics. The videos demonstrate everything from
basic addition through Geometry. The videos on Math A Tube are user-generated so some
videos are better than others.
6. Math TV offers an extensive collection of high-quality mathematics tutorials. Math TV’s
video lessons cover basic mathematics and Algebra. Math TV videos are not easily embedded
in other websites, but they are free and can create your own individualized playlists.
7. Watch now provides a good resource for locating educational videos that one can use in our
classroom. One can search Watch Know by content area categories and subcategories.
EDUCATIONAL APPICATIONS
The impact of social media has been highly significant in the evolution of online
participation. Social media is defined as 'a group of internet-based applications that is built on
the ideological and technological foundations of web 2.0 and that allow the creation and
exchange of User Generated Content'. In order for people to effectively access internet enabled
computers and devices, there it is a twofold process that needs to take place: The device itself
needs to have appropriate assistive technologies and the social media tool need to be designed
to accessibility criteria.
Social media is used in teacher education for a number of reasons. At one level, the
teacher education institutions wish to ensure that newly qualified teachers have the appropriate
social media skills. This is a requirement as part of the teacher education programme and

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student social media skills are assessed through a portfolio. It may be that in the long term
there will be less need for this social media skills development, as students will develop better
social media skills before they reach teacher education. The second dimension, social media in
teacher education is the development of students’ capacity to make appropriate use of social
media in their teaching. This is more challenging, as student teachers sometimes tend to use
the most obvious applications of social media, resulting in over use of these ideas. In some
teacher education institutions, developing social media capacity in student teachers is the
responsibility of one social media specialist. This is an effective way to develop skills and the
basics of educational use of the technology.
However, it may not be the best way to develop more imaginative uses of social media
within each subject area. To achieve a wider spread of social media usage within teacher
education may involve more staff development activities in some institutional. A third
dimension, social media in teacher education is the use of virtual learning environment to
provide supports to student teachers. Examples of this were reported in a number of the
institutions. This is both a useful support to the student teachers and an opportunity for them
to develop some experience of a virtual learning environment. Ideally student teachers should
gain experience of the same virtual learning environment as is intended for school use, but this
may present difficulties as the teacher education institutions are funded through different
agencies and may have adopted different technology.
Benefits of Social Media in Teacher Education
1. Improved skills for staff and a greater understanding of access social media used by
students.
2. Enhances professional development and the effectiveness of the use of social media
with students through collaboration with peers.
3. Materials already in electronic form are more easily adapted into accessible resources
such as large print.
4. It is useful to avoid the communication difficulties.
5. Enables students to demonstrate achievement in ways which might not be possible with
traditional methods.
USING SOCIAL MEDIA IN CLASSROOM TEACHING

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Social media initiatives need to be driven by the provision of appropriate technological
solutions for the challenges faced by communities, rather than by an interest purely in these
physical technologies themselves. Those implementing technological solutions need to ensure
they are context specific, and adapted to local needs and conditions. It is also imperative that
social media initiatives are sustainable of effective by ensuring that the technologies embedded
within them meet the demands of users in appropriate ways. It is essential that potential users
have a sound understanding of how to use new social media beneficially, and a cultural view
of the relationship between learning and technology pedagogically principled, through:
integrating social media use into subject teaching rather than as a discrete subject in school;
employing external stimuli for change and innovation, including video stimulated reflection
and discussion of teachers.
Teaching at school as well as in higher education mostly, concentrates on giving
information which is not the sole objective of teaching its main motto is to;
1. To develop understanding and application of the concepts.
2. To develop the reasoning and thinking power.
3. To improve the comprehension, speed and vocabulary.
4. To develop tolerance, ambiguity, risk taking capacity and scientific temper.
5. To develop expression power.
6. To break the monotony and provide the variety in the teaching learning situation.
7. To use maximum senses to get the information.
8. To enhance the self-learning and evaluation among the students
9. Helps in exchanging their views and get clarification from different experts'
practioners.
10. Construction of the question bank giving appropriate feedback during the preparation
for examination.
11. Study of stimulation software to model real world problem or stimulate experiments
which would be impractical to perform in the laboratory.
12. To broaden the information base and helps in long retention and also in better
understanding.
13. To provide flexibility this is denied by the traditional process.
14. To make the learning joyful.
Based on the above all can make use of the following for the teaching learning process:

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1. Content based software.
2. Open ended software packages.
3. Information application and communication systems.
Every teacher educator should integrate their computing skills into their pedagogical
practice, encourage constructivism, promote collaborative learning among the pupils and
identify the individual differences and develop instructional materials from online and off line
sources and give the best and get the best from the students and contribute to the learning
society.
Using social media for teaching is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for
developing the knowledge and skills needed in the twenty first century. It has to be
accompanied by curriculum reform, by changes in teaching methods that facilitate the
development of skills in a particular subject domain and by changes in assessment. Obviously
many instructors are successfully working in this way, but there is still a great deal of resistance
to such radical change. For example, the future of e-learning as seen by the teacher educators
or trainers and learners will involve social media improvements. This includes wider
bandwidth, better learning platforms, use of audio and video, increased interactivity,
collaborative communication tools. Social media is here to facilitate and increase access to
developing social media must go along with developing pedagogical innovation and quality.
NEED FOR SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION IN COLLEGES OF EDUCATION
Social media integration in colleges of education is needed in order to accomplish many
objectives and improve the quality of lessons in all subject areas as well as social studies. Social
media increasingly pervades various aspects of our daily lives like work, business, teaching,
learning, leisure and health. Since social media leads all processes based on information, every
individual in a society should become social media competent. Thus, all colleges of education
have to be equipped with the necessary social media in order to provide the next generations
with the needed tools and resources for access and use and to attain the expected skills.
Teaching is a profession surrounded by ethical dilemmas. Still, teacher education seems
to be more devoted to training in educational theory than in ethical reflection and use of social
media. If political aims and purposes concerning social networking sites are to be realized,
future teachers, pupils, and educational institutions must play central roles. In order to gain

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knowledge of how ethical teacher education should be practiced, it is important to provide
knowledge about social networking sites usage among student teachers and pupils.
Role in Teaching and Learning
 A supplementary teaching-learning tool
 A follow up tool
 A novel assessment tool
 A tool to encourage interaction and peer learning
 A tool for innovative, experiential team based learning
 A tool for customized one to one learning between learner and tutor.
 A tool to measure independent learning takeaway by every learner.
 Many instructors are interested in learning how to add social media tools into their
curriculum, but they aren’t sure how
 Social media sites can be a huge distraction for students who aimlessly click through
sites
 It can be challenging to find ways to incorporate activities with social media that
promote actual learning.
Advantages
 Enables two way communication in real time
 Mitigates geographical constraint
 Encourages self paced learning
 Techno-savvy professionals are groomed
 Customized user friendly and collaborative contents are prepared
 7x24x365 learning

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