Social Media & Adult Education

Our assignment this week, in EDTECH 543 was to do a little research on the usages of social media in our current area of expertise. Because I currently teach in a GED program, I did my research into the usages of social media in adult education. The purpose of this post, then, is to discuss what it was that I found.

Through my looking, I found that there really weren’t a lot of articles or news items that discussed the usage of social media in adult education. There were a few that discussed its use in higher education. It’s a slightly different environment, but I determined that I had to go with some of those in order to fill out my list. Some of the ones selected also talk about social media more from the perspective of a marketing/promotion point of view which also wasn’t really fitting the purpose of the task. Below are the resources I found and then curated into Pearltrees.

Social Media & Adult Education, by thatedeguy

Despite the ill fitting nature of a few of those resources, one of the overarching themes is that we need to meet students where they are. And students are increasingly spending more and more time on social media. Even within that, however, is the variability of what social media they are using. You might be hard pressed to get your high school students to work with you in Facebook. Set up a group chat in Snapchat though, and you might have much better results.

Even if you can meet them where they are in social media, you’ve still got to deal with the implications for the safety of both yourself and your students. Always check your school’s social media policy before attempting to use social media in your classroom, and think about making some classroom specific policies for the students as well. Our assignment for next week is to create a social media policy, so keep your eyes on this site for more about that next week.

In the mean time, do you teach in an adult ed classroom, or a higher ed classroom and have a social media policy you can point me to? It’s never too early to start the research for next week’s assignment.