Social-media and traditional delivery of professional development appear to be at the opposite ends of a learning continuum. We propose that these two spaces can be blended into powerful learning experiences. In this session we will show how to capitalize on the unique learning formats that social-media has to offer.
At first glimpse social media and traditional delivery of professional development appear to be at the opposite ends of a learning continuum. By definition, social media creates an environment that is interactive using a medium that is quickly and easily accessible from anywhere. Traditional sit and get professional development, on the other hand, is time consuming and intentional about targeting long-term effects on teaching. We propose that these two spaces can actually be blended into powerful, prolonged and meaningful learning experiences for educators. Capitalizing on the prevalence and accessibility of social media we hope to extend the opportunities for educators to develop and reflect on their practice. When leveraged in the right way, social media has shown to be a powerful source for professional learning.
If we think about it in terms of blended-learning, social media is more interactive and engaging than some other course management system. Asking professionals to log into a password protected course discussion board, that often cannot be accessed from a mobile device, we are creating a burden where professionals are less likely to engage or interact. However, through social media, we are simply asking them to use a media tool that they are on all the time anyway. By having the professional learning intermingled with the rest of their lives means that it is ever present, and when ideas develop they can be shared and experienced and contributed to in real time.
In a traditional sit-and-get style professional learning setting, participants only interact and contribute when the interaction is forced on them. It is usually quick and often the thinking is not sustained beyond the forced interaction. Through social media, interaction is constant and relevant. Professionals can take new learning and discussion points and implement them in the real world and immediately share their experiences with their colleagues via pictures and posts. You collect information as you go about your life, snapping a picture or writing a post, tweeting somewhere, sending yourself a note to remember this or that, no matter where you are. By immediately capturing information and sharing it via social media, participants in professional learning are able to make important connections among instructional content and authentic contexts.
Beyond the learner experience, social media allows for the instructor to generate some unique experiences that otherwise may be lost in a traditional setting. Allowing the learning to occur in small manageable bursts that, at the same time, allow for some longer and deeper thinking and discussion is something of a luxury that social media can provide. In this session we plan to show how we are capitalizing on some of these unique learning formats.
Through the use of memes, we are providing rigorous and thought provoking questions that entice discussion and encourage professionals to make immediate changes in their practice. We have created short one minute videos with no narration and minimal captions in order to demonstrate strategies and best practices. These strategies are intended to be immediately accessible to teachers and require minimal preparation. This way it is something they can immediately put into practice and share feedback on how it played out.
This presentation will also offer a look into our work with the use of social media for a project that contains thousands of teachers from across the globe. We will look at the integration of short videos, targeted asynchronous discussion, community building interactions and targeted mini-intensives as we work to enact a major systemic shift in standards, curriculum and practice for this group of teachers. This project is well into it’s second year of a multi stage rollout and we will pull out some of our key findings from our use of social media like initiatives to help with quick and accessible learning opportunities for the teachers. We will also look at how we have adapted our approach to engaging the teachers by developing a stronger integration of social media and social media styled activities.
The use of social media for professional development opportunities does not, however, come without a definite set of challenges. We will address the challenges that have been evident in our work and those we see in the future for social media as professional development work. The biggest challenge that we encounter is the challenge of evidence for teacher engagement and for implementation. The collection of social media feedback (evidence) is a well-documented challenge (citation) and this space is certainly no different. We are sometimes left with many assumptions based on anecdotal findings and overall effects rather than direct observations. This was not a surprise to us as researchers because the experience of social media consumption without feedback is a common experience. We all watch videos, surf the social platforms and quickly integrate the information contained without pausing to like, retweet, share or comment back to the originator. This leads into another challenge for social media work for professional development. Consumers are somewhat programed to take social facts and information with a small bit of skepticism but really defining fact from fiction is often a difficult one to draw. If the intent of social professional development is speed then that adds another layer of difficulty for a teacher to integrate only truly great ideas versus those that are pretty, bright and flashy. Helping teachers to be smarter consumers has to involve developing them as better evaluators of educational material as well.
We will also be engaging our participants in this session in the strategy of a live Twitter chat. Through this we hope to allow real time interaction and feedback during the session as well as opening the opportunity for the conversation to continue after the session has ended.