
The development of new technologies created a new way of communication if we compare how we were communicating with our friend and how our kids are doing now.
The way people communicate with one another has changed significantly.
Back then, we had to go to see our friends because not everybody had a simple home telephone, and we spend hours to speak and to play together in a real place and real-time. Nowadays the young generation communication transformed from real life to virtual reality, they use different social platforms to communicate, search the news, get new knowledge in a variety of areas (drawing, cooking, fashion, new heroes, new movies, games, news about celebrities, memes, etc.). It has advantages and disadvantaged. Unfortunately, as an ES teacher who is running a Distance learning program now, I could not ask my students about the advantages and disadvantages of social media. But I have a young lady at home who has graduated this year, and we as a family went through positive and negative sides of social media.
ADVANTAGES OF USING SOCIAL MEDIA:
- You can reach your friends and other people (it can be a vast audience of people with the same interests) in a timely manner
- You can reach people from another country or continent not only from your street
- You get access to the enormous database of your interest (learn another language, how to dance, how to take photos and edit the movie)
- You can be up to date with the current technology
- You can join it for free
- You can support each other by giving immediate feedback
DISADVANTAGES OF USING SOCIAL MEDIA:
- Cyberbullying – it is easier to bully others through social media than to do it physically. You can get negative response or feedback. You are vulnerable (if you put something that people do not like, the negative comments will be spread across the network quickly as well and stays there)
- It is time-consuming (you start and finish your day reading the news and comments, and you need to put new content constantly in order to keep your audience (new photos, comments, etc.), play a game or chat about various things not related to your everyday life and school.
- Destroys social skills (you do not know how to approach another person, how to read the facial expressions, what say immediately in a different situation.
How do students learn to communicate in digital spaces in my class?
We are using a variety of educational apps to teach, assess, reflect and report on students’ learning:
Kahoot, Linguascope and Explain EDU – for teaching new vocabulary and develop skills
Book Creator and PuppetPals – for teaching and assessing
Seesaw – for giving the instructions, sharing the evidence and reflecting
Google Doc – to keep the information, write drafts and final assignment, share information
Google Slides – to create final presentations
Google Forms – to create questionnaires, to give/ collect feedbacks
The role of technology in education has been changing accordingly to the nowadays reality; teachers start to explore options on how to bring new technology instead of ordinary classroom materials, to move assignments and projects into the web to make more authentic and meaningful for the students.