Leveraging Social Media for Curricular Development

How do we convince math teachers to head to YouTube and subscribe to Numberphile, Mathologer, and 3Blue1Brown, which will help them build dynamic and practical lessons? How do we get our history teachers to open their podcast app and subscribe to Backstory, Revolutions, and The Memory Palace in order to enhance their curricular knowledge? And how do we get English teachers to get on Twitter and augment their novels with content from Brain Pickings, Arts & Letters Daily, and Guardian Books? All of these accounts provide engaging and applicable content that will improve the teaching and learning in our schools.   This style of professional learning through social media drastically improves teachers' depth of knowledge about their subject matter, and it also enhances their ability to connect course content to contemporary issues and career opportunities. Social media provides an open door into the work that professionals do on a day-to-day basis across all of the various industries that we hope to expose students to in our schools. For example, if you want to know what a marine biologist does on a day-to-day basis subscribe to Sea&Me on YouTube. How about an astrophysicist? Listen to the StarTalk podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson. In addition to professional opportunities, social media also provides current event developments in teachers' subject matter and industries. Talented professionals in all industries keep an eye on current developments in the field. Teachers should do the same, and expose their students to this style of learning as well. Never in the history of education has it been so easy to 1) witness the day-to-day of so many professionals in so many careers and 2) access such a deep well of content in an area of interest that updates you in real-time.   As teachers embrace connected learning through professional learning networks, they will learn and curate from other teachers and industry-level professionals to enhance their curriculum. And they will improve their pedagogy by witnessing what, how, and why other teachers of similar grade-level and subject-matter are choosing to engage students and prepare them for the real world.   Adding professional learning into our social media feeds will have exponentially compounding benefits. First, as teachers become comfortable learning in these networks, they will also start to contribute to and collaborate in these networks, which will improve the teaching and learning of all involved in that network. In another positive feedback loop, as teachers engage their media literacy and digital citizenship skills and reap the benefits of this learning, they will pass along that learning to their students, which will bring it into their classrooms and their lives.   I plan to teach this and show examples in a way that allows others to build networks for their courses and disciplines. Finally, I will set up a digital repository where participants can share their networks with other like-minded educators.